Artist Biographies
Nadar
(Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) French, 1820-1910
Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in Paris, Nadar is probably the best known French photographer. His portraits of celebrities and public figures help define
our impression of France in the second half of the 19th century; his panache in conducting his business helped popularize photography.
Educated at the Collège Bourber, Paris (1833-36), Nadar moved to Lyon, where he studied medicine (1837-38) before continuing his studies at the
Hôtel Dieu and the Bicêtre in Paris. He wrote satires and essays and drew caricatures (his pseudonym derived from his barbed wit aimed against the
establishment) for a number of Paris publications, eventually founding several of his own, and was a highly visible figure in the city's cultural and artistic life. Learning
photographic technique from Adophe Bertsch and Camille d'Arnaud, Nadar founded a studio in 1854. Twenty years later his son Paul, also a photographer,
became director of the business and by 1886 headed the firm. He also worked for a time with his brother, Adrien, who sometimes called himself Nadar
jeune, a practice which later prompted Nadar to file a lawsuit.
Nadar's exploits with aerial balloon photography were of both photographic and historic importance. Below ground, he used artificial light to make
surveys of the catacombs and sewers of Parisnovel and highly popular curiosities. With his son Paul as photographer, he is credited with the first
photo-interview, conducted with the scientist and color theorist Michel-Eugène Chevreul on his 100th birthday in 1886. Because of the importance of his work and the
notoriety of his sitters, among them Franz Liszt, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, and Honoré Balzac, Nadar will long occupy a key place in the development of
photography. T.W.F.
Charles Nègre
French, 1820-1880
A key figure in early French photography, Charles Nègre provides a link to photography's roots in painting and other visual arts. Nègre (born in Grasse) was
a successful painter who had studied with Paul Delaroche, Michel Drolling, and Jean-Dominique Ingres. Beginning in 1843 he exhibited his work in various
salons, winning high awards in 1851-52. His paintings were praised and purchased by, among others, Napoléon III.
Like many other 19th-century artists, Nègre initially began making photographs to aid his painting. In 1844 he produced several daguerreotypes
before later switching to calotypes. He soon developed a personal style, using the textured quality of the paper negative to subordinate detail to overall effect in his
images, an approach he continued in various media throughout his career. Among Nègre's innovative subjects were street scenes that combined an intimacy
of vision with the immediacy of urban life, presented with a painter's attention to composition. Many of these were presented in an 1851 exhibition of the
Société heliographique. A founding member of the Société française de photographie, he was also a consummate architectural photographer, receiving numerous
government commissions.
Nègre's technical innovationsespecially in the photogravure process, a subject on which he was an acknowledged authoritycontributed to the
development of photography. He never gave up his painting, however, and became a drawing master at the Lycée Impérial in Nice after moving there in 1863
for health reasons. T.W.F.
Sonya Noskowiak
American, b. Germany, 1900-1975
Born in Leipzig and raised in Chile, Sonya Noskowiak moved to California with her family in 1915. While working as a receptionist in the studio of pictorial
photographer Johan Hagemeyer in the late 1920s, she met Edward Weston. From 1929-34 Noskowiak worked as Weston's darkroom assistant and studied with
him. His work and his advocacy of "straight," unmanipulated photography were strong influences, and in 1932 Noskowiak joined him, Ansel Adams,
Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and others to found Group f/64.
In the group's first exhibition that year at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, Noskowiak exhibited photographs of natural
objects (rocks, leaves, and sand) that emphasized their form and texture. Over the following years she concentrated on architectural and industrial subjects and in
1935 opened her own studio in San Francisco, working as a portrait, fashion, and commercial photographer. Noskowiak was active as a photographer until the
mid-1960s. In 1978 the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, organized a retrospective exhibition of her work. M.M.
Paul Outerbridge, Jr.
American, 1896-1958
Paul Outerbridge, Jr., was a modernist photographer and early pioneer in color work who embarked on a successful advertising career in the 1920s.
Following studies at the Art Students League in his native New York (1915-17) and service in the British Royal Flying Corps (Canada) and U.S. Army, Outerbridge
enrolled in Clarence H. White's School of Photography in 1921. Influenced by the school's strong emphasis on design, he created carefully composed, often
abstracted, still-life studies of everyday objects. After a year of study he began work as a commercial photographer, providing innovative images for such publications
as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper's
Bazaar. He also continued his personal work, producing still lifes, cityscapes, and figure studies.
In 1925 Outerbridge moved to Paris, where he established himself as a freelance photographer and became acquainted with a number of artists,
including Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott. Three years later he was in Berlin working on motion pictures and that same year also worked in
London as a set advisor to film director E. A. Dupont. Returning to the United States in 1929, Outerbridge resumed his commercial work, first in New York City, then
in Monsey, New York. He also experimented with color photography, perfecting the three-color carbo process technique that he used during the 1930s.
Outerbridge moved to Hollywood in 1943, but soon left to settle in Laguna Beach and open a small portrait studio. Following his marriage to fashion
designer Lois Weir in 1945, Outerbridge closed his studio to focus on their joint fashion business, Lois-Paul Originals. He also traveled extensively during
these years. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1958, Outerbridge contributed a column on color photography to
U.S. Camera magazine. M.M.
Gordon Parks
American, 1912-
Writer, musician, film director, and photographer Gordon Alexander Buchanan Parks (born in Fort Scott, Kansas) has been particularly influential in the
arenas of photojournalism and documentary photography. A self-taught photographer, Parks became seriously interested in the medium in 1937 upon seeing
images made for the Farm Security Administration. Roy Stryker, who headed the fsa photography program, later hired him for several assignments (1942-43).
Parks went on to work as an information correspondent during World War II and worked for Stryker on the Standard Oil of New Jersey photography project from
1945-48. He was a staff photographer for
Life magazine (1948-61) and the editorial director of
Essence magazine (1970-73). His coverage of the Black Muslim
movement of the 1960s, his portraits of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, and his story on Flavio da Silva, a poverty-stricken Brazilian boy, testify to the power and
compassion of his images.
Parks has received many prestigious awards, including a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship (1942), an award from the National Council for Christians
and Jews (1964), the Frederic W. Brehm Award (1962), the Carr Van Adna Journalism Award, Ohio University (1970), and the Spingarn Medalthe naacp's
highest honor (1972). In 1967 Nikon named Parks as the photographer and writer who had done the most to promote worldwide understanding. He holds 14
honorary degrees.
Parks has also worked in color, primarily for his more artistic book projects, including
Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things (1971) and
A Poet and his Camera (1968). His films include
Shaft (1972), Leadbelly (1976), The Super
Crops (1974), and his most widely recognized,
The Learning Tree (1969), for which he wrote the screen adaptation of his own novel and composed the musical score. He has had one-person exhibitions throughout the United States,
including the Art Institute of Chicago (1953), the Baltimore Museum of Art (1984), and the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin (1985). Parks lives in New York.
A.W.
Christopher Pekoc
American, 1941-
Trained as a painter at Kent State University (1968-70), Cleveland-born Christopher Pekoc has worked extensively with mixed-media collage since 1987. To
create his works Pekoc combines photogenerated imageryoften fragments of body parts and menacing objects such as thorns, spikes, and severed
wingswith paint, glue, shellac, and other materials. In 1992 he was one of 11 Cleveland artists invited to participate in a poster project sponsored by the Cleveland
Health Issues Task Force, Ohio's oldest aids organization. Working from the insights of Jim Kilonsky, one of his former students who was hiv positivePekoc
fabricated his commission using as a central motif the handas a symbol of creation, compassion, and healing.
Pekoc has had one-person exhibitions at the Akron Art Institute (1978), Kenyon College (1986), and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art
(1991), and has been awarded fellowships by the Ohio Arts Council (1990, 1994). He lives in Cleveland, teaching painting at Case Western Reserve University. A.W.
William Lake Price
British, 1810-1896
William Lake Price was trained as an architectural and topographical artist in the studio of Augustus Charles Pugin. Price's work, exhibited at the Royal
Academy between 1828-32 and at the Old Watercolour Society between 1828-52, consisted primarily of antiquarian, portrait, and topographical views, including the
stately interiors, historical subjects, and genre scenes typical of the era. Turning to photography in the mid-1850s, Price espoused the same sensibility that had
served him in painting. He joined the Photographic Society in London and submitted as his first entry in the annual
Photographic Album for the Year 1855 the sort
of genre scene that would ensure his popularity for some time. In 1858 he published a collection of portraits entitled
Portraits of Eminent British Artists.
Price, like Oscar G. Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, advocated an approach to photography associated with the fine arts. All used methods
of composite or combination printing, in which scenes were composed in studies and sketches, and then assembled by combining a variety of individual prints.
The resulting composition was rephotographed as the final work. Price wrote extensively on this process and other technical subjects in photography, publishing
A Manual of Photographic Manipulation: Treating of the Practice of the Art and Its Various Applications to
Nature (1858). His photograph Don
Quixote and a series on Robinson Crusoe reveal the sentimental nature of his most popular works. T.W.F.
The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.
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