Artist Biographies
Man Ray
(Emanuel Rudnitsky) American, 1890-1976
Man Ray (born Emanuel Rudnitsky in Philadelphia) was an avant-garde painter and photographer active in the dada and surrealist movements who
became known for his experiments with the photogram and solarization. He grew up in New York and in his 20s worked in the city as a commercial artist, attending
night classes at the National Academy of Design and lectures at the avant-garde Ferrer Social Center. Visiting the 1913 Armory show and "291," Alfred Stieglitz's
gallery, he became increasingly familiar with the latest developments in modern art.
In 1915 Man Ray had his first one-person show of paintings and drawings at New York's Daniel Gallery and met French artist Marcel Duchamp,
with whom he became lifelong friends. He also began taking photographs that year as a way to document his paintings. Along with Duchamp and Francis
Picabia, another French artist, Man Ray was a member of the New York dada group during World War I and in the years immediately following the war. In 1921 he
moved to Paris, soon establishing himself as a professional portrait and fashion photographer. He also became interested in experimental photography, producing
photograms (cameraless photographs that he called rayographs) and pioneering the use of solarization, a technique accidentally discovered by his darkroom
assistant, Lee Miller, in 1929.
Throughout the 1920s-30s Man Ray worked with surrealist painters and poets on a number of collaborative projects, providing photographs for
their books and articles. He also made avant-garde films, including
Le Retour à la raison (1923), Emak
Bakia (1926), L'Etoile de mer (1928), and
Les Mysteres du Chateau du Des (1929). Widely recognized for its innovation, his work was shown at the first invitational exhibition of contemporary modernist photography
held in Paris at the Salon de l'Escalier at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées (1928) and at the
Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart (1929).
In 1940 Man Ray moved to Hollywood, where he worked as a freelance photographer and painter until returning to Paris in 1951. He experimented
with color photography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but painting became his primary interest. One of his paintings is also in the collection of the Cleveland
Museum of Art.
Man Ray's photographs have been exhibited in more than 100 one-artist exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art (1966), a showing at the Venice Biennale (1976), and major exhibitions at the Kunstverein, Frankfurt (1979, and tour), and the Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris (1981). Awarded the Gold Medal for photography at the Venice Biennale in 1961, Man Ray's imageswhich emphasize chance and the irrational and which
deliberately mock traditional ideas of artcontinue to fascinate and inspire generations of photographers. M.M.
Sally Mann
American, 1951-
Explorations of childhood, adolescence, and puberty characterize the imagery of Sally Mann (born Sally Munger), who first came to public attention for her
series on pre-teenage girls, published in 1988 as
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. Since 1984 her images have focused on family scenes centered around
her three children, Emmet, Jessie, and Virginia. Working in black and white with a large-format view camera, Mann is both documentarian and storyteller,
chronicling her children's physical and emotional maturity as she photographs their everyday mishaps and playtime adventures. The children often appear nude,
without modesty, and the candor of her subjects has sparked controversy over the photographs as part of the public domain and over issues of childhood sexuality
and freedom. It has also raised debates about Mann herself, as she moves between roles as artist and mother.
Mann studied English and creative writing at Hollins College in Virginia (B.A., 1974; M.A., 1975). She took photography courses at Praestegaard
Film School (1971), the Aegean School of Fine Arts (1972), Apeiron (1973), and the Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop (1973). Among her awards are
fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1973, 1976), the Friends of Photography (1974), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (1982), the National
Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1988, 1992), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1987), the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (1989),
and Artists in the Visual Arts (1989). Her publications include
Second Sight: The Photographs of Sally Mann (1983),
Immediate Family (1992), and
Halloween (1993). Mann has shown in one-person exhibitions at the Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem (1988), the Museum of Photographic Art, San
Diego (1989), and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1990). In 1994 the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, organized a traveling
exhibition titled Still Time. Mann lives in her native Lexington, Virginia. A.W.
Charles Marville
French, 1816-c. 1879
At the invitation of the city of Paris, photographer Charles Marville was among the first to document the ancient quarters of his birthplace. His views, taken in
the late 1850s, were intended to record the many buildings and neighborhoods ultimately destroyed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann's urban planning
project that would create the boulevards and open spaces of modern Paris. While Marville's survey of the city, extensive and thorough in scope, prefigured other
important efforts of its kind, it is distinguished by its emotional accessibility. His work beautifully reveals a Paris that has long disappeared.
Originally trained as a painter and illustrator, Marville worked with both calotype and glass plate negatives. He photographed in France, Italy,
Germany, and Algeria, becoming most well known for his architectural imagery but also producing acclaimed landscapes and studies of trees. Many of Marville's
early views, often considered his best, were included in the albums of Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Évrard before the printer's establishment in Lille closed in 1855.
Named official photographer of Paris in 1862, Marville also served as photographer to the Imperial Museum of the Louvre and to King Vittorio Emmanuelle of Italy.
T.W.F.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
American, 1925-1972
In 1950 Gene Meatyard purchased a camera from his employer, an optical firm in Lexington, Kentucky, in order to photograph his newborn son. From that
time until his premature death from cancer, Meatyard declared himself a "dedicated amateur," creating a body of work that reflected his fascination with the camera
as both a tool of scientific vision and a means for metaphoric discovery. His square-format, black-and-white images ranged from dynamic environmental
abstractions to surreal theatrical tableaux, often featuring his children and their friends obscured by Halloween masks and arranged in bizarre, sometimes
frightening poses. His most well-known series was published as
The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater (1974), in which the children and Meatyard's wife, Madelyn,
masqueraded as a fictitious family of grotesques.
Themes of faith, family, and home pervade Meatyard's visions, reflecting his interest in Zen philosophy, poetry, and art history and theory. Included in
his circle of friends were poet and painter Guy Davenport, Christian theologian and monk Thomas Merton, poet and essayist Wendell Barry, poet Denise
Levertov, poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, and literary historian Hugh Kenner.
Born in Normal, Illinois, and educated at Williams College (1943-44) and Wesleyan University (1950), Meatyard was largely self-taught as a
photographer, although he did study for brief periods in the mid-1950s with Van Deren Coke, Minor White, and Henry Holmes Smith. In 1961 he received the New
Talent U.S.A. award. Exhibited widely throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, his work was the subject of several posthumous retrospective exhibitions. Major
publications include Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1970);
The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971), a collaboration with Wendell Barry; and
Ralph Eugene Meatyard: An American
Visionary (1991), organized by the Akron Art Museum. A.W.
Ray K. Metzker
American, 1931-
As a student of Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, and Harry Callahan in Chicago at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Ray Metzker was
influenced by the spirit of photographic experimentation at the "New Bauhaus." Extending photography's formal vocabulary beyond description and into the realm
of visual puzzles, Metzker is best known for his creative use of pattern, high tonal contrast, focus, print size, and composition. He first explored these issues in
his single-image work of the 1950s, moving in the 1960s to make multiframe assemblages that juxtaposed highly contrasted fragments of figures, objects, and
architectural elements to create kinetic patterns and mosaic grids. Envisioning an entire roll of film as one negative, Metzker describes his
Composites series as an explanation of "the potential of the black-and-white still photograph to deal with the complexity of succession and simultaneity."
Metzker resumed the single-image format in a series of New Mexican landscapes during the early 1970s, fusing high-contrast blocks created by
buildings, leaves, and his own shadow with subjects rendered in the more traditional gradation of black-and-white tones. His
Pictus Interruptus series of 1977 continued the play of tone and perspective, wherein objects placed close to the lens appeared blurred, obscuring scenic backdrops views of Greece and
Philadelphia. In 1989, with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency from the La Napoule Foundation, Metzker photographed in
the south of France for his series titled
Sojourn. In this and his later series In Nature's
Realm (1994), he continued to explore the photographic interplay of
natural textures and forms.
Born in Milwaukee, Metzker earned a B.A. in art from Beloit College (1953) and an M.S. in photography from the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute
of Technology (1959). His work has been featured in one-person exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (1959, 1985, 1991), the Museum of Modern Art,
New York (1967), the Milwaukee Art Center (1970), the International Center of Photography, New York (1978), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1984), the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1985), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1985), the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1986), George Eastman House,
Rochester (1986), the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C (1986), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1991). Metzker has
received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1966, 1979) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1988), an award from
La Napoule Foundation, France (1989), and a Bernheim Fellowship (1989).
Metzker has taught photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (1977), the University of New Mexico (1970-72), Columbia College (1980),
and the Philadelphia College of Art (1962-80). He lives in Philadelphia and Moab, Utah. A.W.
Joel Meyerowitz
American, 1938-
Joel Meyerowitz began taking black-and-white photographs in the streets of New York during the 1960s, working with his 35mm Leica camera alongside
Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. With the emergence of new technologies in the early 1970s, he successfully translated his vision to color images. In
1976 Meyerowitz further expanded his technical vocabulary by using a large-format camera to photograph in and around Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Published
as Cape Light: Photographs by Joel
Meyerowitz (1978), the series explores the manipulation of light and the full range of color available to the medium. He is
also recognized for his photographs of St. Louis, commissioned by the city in 1977 and published four years later as
St. Louis and The Arch (1981).
Meyerowitz (born in New York City) studied medical drawing and painting at Ohio State University (B.F.A., 1959), then worked for four years in
advertising as an art director. He had his first one-person exhibition at George Eastman House, Rochester (1966), and has since had similar shows throughout
the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1968), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1978). His awards include
fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1970, 1978) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1978), and a New York Creative
Artists Public Service Grant (1976). In 1981 he was voted Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography. Meyerowitz lives in Manhattan. A.W.
Duane Michals
American, 1932-
Although believing reality to be invisible, Duane Michals has used his camera to give photographic credulity to myths, fantasy, spirits, and dreams. His
innovative narrative sequences question nothing less than the nature of truth.
Michals (born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania) studied at the University of Denver (B.A., 1953) and Parsons School of Design in New York (1956-57).
Self-taught as a photographer, he made his first portraits in 1958 while on a trip to Russia and established himself commercially upon returning to New York City.
He has continued to maintain an active commercial freelance career, completing assignments for
Vogue, Esquire, Mademoiselle,
Horizon, and Scientific American magazines. In 1964 Michals began making personal images; his earliest scenes included empty cafes, buses, stores, and laundromats. Two years later,
he started his first sequence.
Influenced by surrealist painters such as Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, Michals addresses sexuality, death, and spirituality in open-ended
narratives, relying on the artifice of drama to straddle the line between fact and fiction. Devices such as multiple exposures and blurred focus add to his witty
questioning of photographic veracity. In 1971 he began to accompany his sequences with handwritten texts, presenting series geared to the book form. Michals's
major publications include Sequences (1970),
The Journey of the Spirit after Death (1971),
Things Are Queer (1973), Chance
Meeting (1973), Paradise Regained (1973),
Take One and See Mount Fujiyama and Other
Stories (1976), Real Dreams (1977), Homage to Cavafy: Ten Poems by Constantine Cavafy/Ten
Photographs by Duane Michals (1978), and Upside Down, Inside Out and
Backwards (1993). His work has been shown internationally, with one-person exhibitions
at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970), the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (1989, European tour), and the Museum of Photographic Arts,
San Diego (1990, national tour).
Michals has received a New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1975), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976) and
the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts (1978), the Medaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris (1982), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art
(1991), an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society, Bath (1992), the Century Award from the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (1993), and
a gold medal for photography from the National Arts Club, New York (1994). He taught as the Meadows Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southern
Methodist University (1989) and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston (1993). Michals lives in New York. A.W.
Richard Misrach
American, 1949-
The photographs of Richard Misrach are meditations on power and beauty. From his early black-and-white documentation of 1970s Berkeley to his
extensive nighttime studies of cacti and color Desert
Cantos cycles, Misrach's subjectsphotographed with careful attention to light and compositionare charged
with sociopolitical overtones.
For Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American
West (1990), he collaborated with his wife, Miriam Weisang Misrach, to investigate the destruction of
the desert in the name of military advance. Livestock killed by nuclear fallout,
Playboy magazines riddled with bullet holes, portrait and landscape paintings from
the hallowed halls of southwestern museumseach constitutes different
Desert Cantos (1987). Begun in the early 1980s, this series was exhibited as a
traveling retrospective, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard
Misrach, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with accompanying
catalogue (1996). Misrach's other monographs include
Telegraph 3 a.m.: The Street People of Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley,
California (1974), (a photographic
book) (1979), Richard Misrach:
1975-1987 (1988), and Violent Legacies: Three
Cantos (1992).
Born in Los Angeles, Misrach earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley (1971). There he served on the photography
staff of the Associated Students of the University of California (1971-77). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973, 1977,
1984), the Friends of Photography (1976), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), and Eureka (1990). Misrach lives in Emeryville, California. A.W.
Lisette Model
American, b. Austria, 1901-1983
Born Elise Amelie Felicie Stern (the family name was changed to Seybert in 1903) in Vienna, active first in France and then New York, Lisette Model
became known for her interest in unconventional subject matter photographed in a rapid, straightforward manner. Following studies in music and painting, she took
up photography in 1933 while living in Paris and the next year began a series picturing vacationers along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. In 1938 Model
and her husband, Russian painter Evsa Model, immigrated to New York City.
In the early 1940s, Model's work began to appear in
PM's Weekly (where Ralph Steiner was art editor),
Cue, and U.S. Camera, and two of her
photographs were purchased by Beaumont Newhall for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She also received occasional assignments from
Ladies' Home Journal, Look, and
Life, and began an association with Harper's
Bazaar, producing images for Alexey Brodovitch, the magazine's
influential art director. Model's photographs of Coney Island, a Bowery nightclub, blind people, settlement houses, and the circus appeared in
Bazaar from 1941-55. The Photo League organized her first one-person show in 1941; exhibitions followed at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943) and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
San Francisco (1946).
In the late 1940s, Model began teaching photography, first at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (1949) and then at the New School
for Social Research in New York (1951-82). She also taught privately, becoming over the years a respected and influential mentor. Model continued to exhibit
her work throughout the 1950s-70s and in 1965 was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She remained active as
a teacher and photographer until her death in 1983. Seven years later her work was featured in a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
M.M.
László Moholy-Nagy
American, b. Austria-Hungary, 1895-1946
László Moholy-Nagy was an avant-garde painter, photographer, filmmaker, writer, and stage and graphic designer known for his experimental approach. He
was also an influential teacher and advocate of the "new photography," the international movement that achieved prominence in Europe after World War I.
Moholy-Nagy (born in Bácsborsod) studied law at the University of Budapest (1914) and served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war
(1915-17). Wounded, he became interested in art during his convalescence and, although briefly resuming his law studies, decided to pursue a career in the arts. In
late 1919 he moved to Vienna, then settled in Berlin, where he became associated with the dadaists and other avant-garde artists. He took part in his first
exhibition in 1922 at the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, showing abstract paintings and metal sculpture. That same year he and his wife, Lucia Moholy, began investigating
photograms (cameraless photographs) and over the next several years would continue to experiment, producing negative prints, photomontages, photocollages,
and photographs taken from a variety of viewpoints and angles.
In 1923 Walter Gropius invited Moholy-Nagy to head the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy also taught the school's
introductory course and collaborated with his wife and Gropius to edit several volumes in the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) series. In 1925 he published his
influential book Malerei, Photographie,
Film (Painting, Photography, Film) and the following year completed his first film,
Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still
Life).
Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928 following the resignation of Gropius and moved to Berlin to work as a commercial artist, specializing in stage
and graphic design, as well as in film. The following year he published
Von Material zu Architektur (published in translation as
The New Vision: From Material to
Architecture, 1930) and helped organize Film und
Foto, the well-known exhibition of avant-garde photography and film held in Stuttgart. He also exhibited more
than 90 photographs in the show.
Following his 1932 divorce and the Nazi rise to power in Germany, Moholy-Nagy immigrated to Amsterdam (1934) and then England (1935). He
was invited to Chicago in 1937 to found the New Bauhaus (reorganized as the Chicago School of Design in 1939 and then renamed the Institute of Design in
1944). Moholy-Nagy directed the school until 1946, when he died of leukemia. M.M.
Abelardo Morell
American, b. Cuba, 1948-
Havana-born Abe Morell became interested in photography while a student of John McKee at Bowdoin College in Maine (B.A., 1977). Fascinated by the
surreal, he initially produced manipulated prints of outlandish scenarios. The work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, however, showed
Morell "that straight photography could pack more surrealism into a picture" than he could achieve through manipulation. Adopting a 35mm straight technique, in
1978 he traveled to Miami and New York to work as a street photographer in the vein of Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, continuing in this format at Yale
University (M.F.A., 1981).
In the late 1980s, Morell began two series for which he is best known: large-scale black-and-white photographs of interior spaces made with a
self-built camera obscura, and still lifes of pictures of the pictures in books. The images provide clever post-modern commentary on the nature of photographic
representation by referencing the medium's beginnings while simultaneously celebrating the ephemeral magic of light and shadow. Devoid of human subjects, these
psychologically complex interior landscapes allude to the changing spheres of childhood and familyand our understanding of history itselfin
contemporary middle-class society.
Morell has received fellowships from the Cintas Foundation (1992-93) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1993-94). He
currently chairs the photography department at Massachusetts College of Art and lives in Quincy. A.W.
Eadweard J. Muybridge
(Edward James Muggeridge) American, b. England, 1830-1904
Around 1852 Edward James Muggeridge, born in Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey, immigrated to California and by 1856 had established himself in the book
business in San Francisco. He learned the art of photography in 1867, possibly from his friend Silas Selleck. Soon after, he emerged as the
"artist-photographer" Eadweard Muybridge. Also known as "Helios," the proprietor of a mobile photo wagon called the Flying Studio, he became associated with Selleck's
cosmopolitan gallery.
Muybridge was one of the best early western landscape photographers. His work included a coastal survey for the U.S. government, as well as
topographical, landscape, and portrait photographs made from Alaska to Central America. His large wet plate views of Yosemite rank with those of Carleton
Watkins as among the finest ever taken, and his multiprint panoramas of San Francisco are highly prized.
In 1872 Muybridge began the experimental study that occupied him for the remainder of his life and for which he is best known. It stemmed from a
commission by former California governor Leland Stanford, Jr., who asked him to capture photographically the movement of a galloping horse. Muybridge
quickly became a renowned lecturer and authority on the photography of motion, developing one of the first camera shutters in 1869 and the zoogyroscope (an
early machine for projecting pictures that appeared to move) in 1880. His work contributed to the development of the motion picture.
Muybridge continued his investigations for three years at the University of Pennsylvania (1883-86) and in 1887 published the result of some 15 years
of accumulated research in the 11 volumes of his immense study,
Animal Locomotion, which consisted of 19,347 negatives. Muybridge's own stride was
broken temporarily by his trial in 1874 for the murder of his wife's lover, a charge that he acknowledged but of which he was acquitted. T.W.F.
The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.
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