Artist Biographies
Penny Rakoff
American, 1951-
An astute understanding of color and light characterizes the images of Penny Rakoff. Trained in painting at the University of Michigan, Rakoff has translated
her interest in color theory and composition to her photographic work. By controlling and manipulating natural and artificial light in extended night-time
exposures, she conjures spectral, often surreal displays from otherwise banal subject matter.
For Color Pleasures of Miami, her earliest body of photographs in this vein (1978), Rakoff traveled the Florida city and its suburbs. The preponderance
of illuminated palm trees, lawn ornaments, and glowing swimming pools proved an environment well suited to her concerns. She has continued to explore the
fabricated nature of American culture in Akron
Landscapes, seeking out residential and industrial sites to photograph at night in her trademark aurora of lights.
Rakoff was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. After earning her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan (1973), she pursued photography
at the Rochester Institute of Technology (M.F.A., 1976) and with Nathan Lyons at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester (1978). After teaching for a year at
the State University of New York College at Oswego, in 1978 Rakoff relocated to Ohio to accept a position at the University of Akron, where she continues to
teach. She is the recipient of awards from the Ohio Arts Council (1981, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1994) and from the Cleveland Museum of Art for her entries in the
museum's regional juried exhibition, the May Show (1984, 1987). In recent years, Rakoff has also turned her attention to the production of public art and installations.
She lives in Cleveland. A.W.
William H. Rau
American, 1855-1920
William Herman Rau was a Philadelphian with close ties to that city's photographic activities. The brother of photographer George Rau (and son of coal merchant John Frederick Rau), William married Louise
Bell, daughter of photographer William Bell. He had worked for Bell until purchasing his father-in-law's company in 1878. Louise Bell Rau later exhibited her own
work in pictorialist circles. Among Rau's other associates besides his brother George, with whom he opened a photographic studio in 1885, were the well-known
photographic publisher Edward L. Wilson, and John Moran, brother of landscape artist Thomas Moran.
In 1874 Rau had joined an international expedition to the South Seas to photograph the transit of Venus, working with John Moran on the project.
He then worked intermittently in the southwest United States, including a period with William Henry Jackson. In 1881 he accompanied Edward Wilson to
Egypt, where he made an extensive set of stereoviews and possibly some larger prints, although these have never been identified. He worked in Philadelphia during
the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and was later the official photographer for the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland.
Best known for his railroad and landscape images, Rau was hired in 1890 by the Pennsylvania Railroad and in 1899 by the Lehigh Valley Railroad,
for which he produced a series of views from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. He also recorded the Johnstown flood and the 1904
Baltimore fire. Today, Rau is important for his position linking, through subject and style, key aspects of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. T.W.F.
Henri-Victor Regnault
French, 1810-1878
The work of French calotypist Henri-Victor Regnault (born in Aix-la-Chapelle) remains fervently admired. A physicist and chemist, he taught at the
École Polytechnique and Collège de France. Working with his students in 1847, he verified Blanquart-Évrard's advancements, using paper to obtain negatives. He
also began making photographs himself.
From 1852-71 Regnault served as director of the famous porcelain factory, the Manufacture de Sèvres. While his tenure there was marked by
considerable displeasure with his highly scientific approach, his artistic style seems to have flourished through photography. His landscape views and portraiture,
radically simple in conception and deeply emotional in tone, seem polar opposites of the highly finished, ornate work he produced in his official position.
Regnault was at the center of a serious group of amateur photographers in Sèvres, which included Louis-Rémy Robert and E. Béranger. He was
a founding member of the Société héliographique (1851) and the Société française de photographie (1854), which he served as president from 1855-68. He
was also made an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society in London. His work is known to have been collected by other photographers, including
John Stewart, the British photographer whose own group was based at Pau in southern France. Regnault eventually left photography after the death of his son in
the Franco-Prussian war and the war-related destruction of his laboratory in Sèvres. T.W.F.
Albert Renger-Patzsch
German, 1897-1966
Albert Renger-Patzsch (born in Würzburg) was a pioneering and influential proponent of the
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity or New Realism) in
photography beginning in the 1920s. The son of an enthusiastic amateur photographer, Renger-Patzsch began taking photographs in his youth. Following studies in
Dresden and service in the German army, he worked as director of the Folkwang Photographic Archives in Hagen for three years (1922-25), then established himself as
a freelance photographer in Bad Harzburg and published his first book,
Das Chorgestühl von Cappenberg (The Choir Stalls of
Cappenberg, 1925).
Three years later Renger-Patzsch moved to Essen, where he continued his freelance work and published
Die Welt ist Schön (The World Is
Beautiful), his well-known book containing 100 clear, precise photographs of plant and animal forms, landscape, architecture, and other manufactured objects, often in
extreme closeup views. Through the pictures in Die Welt ist
Schön, Renger-Patzsch expressed his belief in straight photography and the ability of the camera
to clearly and realistically portray the physical world. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he continued to produce illustrated books, publishing monographs
on Lubeck, Dresden, Hamburg, and the Essen Cathedral. He also taught for two semesters at the Folkwangschule in Essen (1933-34). In 1944 Renger-Patzsch
lost thousands of his negatives when his studio was destroyed in an air raid during World War II. Around this time he moved to Wamel bei Soest and began
focusing on landscape photography.
Throughout his career Renger-Patzsch took part in a number of exhibitions, including the 1929
Film und Foto show of avant-garde photography and
film in Stuttgart. In 1957 he was awarded the David Octavius Hill Medal by the Society of German Photographers for his contributions to the medium and in
1960 received the German Society for Photography Culture Prize. M.M.
ringl + pit
Ellen Auerbach
American, b. Germany, 1906-; and
Grete Stern
Argentinean, b. Germany, 1904-
Ringl + pit was an avant-garde commercial studio in Berlin operated by Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern during the early 1930s. Auerbach (born
Ellen Rosenberg in Karlsruhe) had studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie in Karlsruhe (1924-27) and the Kunstschule in Stuttgart (1928) before moving to Berlin
in 1928 to study photography with Walter Peterhans. Stern (born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld) had studied graphic arts at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart
(1924-27) before studying with Peterhans, first as a private pupil in Berlin and then as a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Peterhans had begun teaching in 1929.
Stern and Rosenberg met through Peterhans. After Stern bought their former teacher's Berlin studio in 1930, they opened ringl + pit (a moniker
derived from their childhood nicknames), specializing in portraiture, still life, advertising photography, and magazine illustration. The studio soon became known as
one of the most innovative in Germany, producing clear and precise images in the spirit of the "new photography." Their work was also notable for its imaginative
use of surrealist motifs and critical humor. Photographs by ringl + pit appeared in such periodicals as
Gebrauchsgraphik (Commercial Art) and
Cahiers d'art as well as Neue Frauenkleidung und
Frauenkultur (New Women's Clothing and Women's
Culture), while the firm's advertising clients ranged from manufacturers of
hair lotion and cigarettes to distributors of petroleum products.
The ringl + pit studio closed in 1933 following Hitler's rise to power. Stern immigrated to London, where she worked as a freelance photographer
before moving to Buenos Aires in 1936 with her husband, photographer Horacio Coppola. She worked for a number of years as a photographer for the Museo
Nacional de Bellas Artes (1956-70) and did freelance work for architects, publishers, artists, and art galleries. In the early 1960s she undertook an extensive
documentation project of Indian culture in Gran Chaco, Argentina.
Rosenberg immigrated to Palestine, where she photographed for w.i.z.o. (Women's International Zionist Organization). In 1936 she moved to London
to take over Stern's photographic studio but, unable to obtain a work permit, left for the United States the following year. That same year she married
Walter Auerbach. During the late 1930s and early 1940s she photographed a private print collection in Philadelphia and experimented with infrared and ultraviolet
fluorescence photography. After moving to New York City in the mid-1940s, she worked as a freelance photographer. From 1946-48 Auerbach made film and
photographic studies of babies and small children for the Menninger Foundation, a research institute based in Kansas, and in 1955-56 traveled through Mexico
with Eliot Porter taking color photographs of church interiors for the book
Mexican Churches. In 1965 she began work as an educational therapist for children
with learning difficulties at the Educational Institute for Learning and Research in New York, a job she continued until 1986. Auerbach lives in New York; Stern lives
in Buenos Aires. M.M.
Louis-Rémy Robert
French, 1811-1882
Born in Paris, Louis-Rémy Robert was trained by his father as a painter on porcelain and glass, eventually succeeding him as chief in charge of the
workshops of painters and gilders at the Manufacture de Sèvres. He developed an active interest in photography, probably due in part to his friendship with
Henri-Victor Regnault, who was appointed director at Sèvres in 1852, and whom Robert succeeded in 1871.
Robert's views are frequently more traditional and classically inclined than those of Regnault. His well-known series on the architecture, gardens, and
art of Versailles, published by Louis-Désire Blanquart-Évrard as
Souvenirs de Versailles (1853), reflects an appreciation of the heritage in French culture and
designtraditions with which Robert was familiar, on a smaller scale, through his background in porcelain and glass decoration.
Robert was also a technical innovator, a friend of the printers Blanquart-Évrard and Alphonse Louis Poitevin, and served as a judge for the
competition originated by the Duc de Luynes to further research into the longevity of photographic prints. A member of the Société française de photographie, Robert
exhibited his work in Paris, Brussels, and London between 1855-62 and lectured on photography at the École des Ponts et Chausées from 1858-72. T.W.F.
Henry Peach Robinson
British, 1830-1901
Considered the founder of the pictorialist school of photography, Henry Peach Robinson is both a highly regarded and a controversial figure in the history of
the medium. Born in Ludlow, Shropshire, Robinson began his career as a painter and became interested in photography in 1852. In 1857 he opened a portrait
studio.
A leading exponent of photography as a fine art, Robinson is best known for his composite photographs. Constructed through a process of design
similar to painting, these images were produced by first assembling several individual photographs and then rephotographing them into a final composition.
They were particularly popular with the Victorian public, in part for their sentimental content. Robinson's manipulative approach, however, raised hotly contended
questions among critics and artists.
Robinson exhibited extensively, receiving more than 100 medals, prizes, and honors. Called "the Nestor of pictorial photography," he lectured and
published numerous articles and 10 books, which not only appeared in later editions but often can be found today. He was affiliated with the Linked Ring, the
Photographic Exchange Club, the Amateur Photographic Association, and the Royal Photographic Society, serving as vice president in 1887 and named an
Honorary Fellow in 1900.
One of Robinson's earliest and most controversial photographs was
Fading Away, shown in 1858 and bought by Prince Albert for his collection. This
era marks the high-water point of the pictorialists' synthetic approach, even though the discussion of manipulated prints would continue throughout the century.
T.W.F.
Leo Rubinfien
American, 1953-
Leo Rubinfien is an art critic, photographer, filmmaker, and educator. A student of philosophy and literature at Reed College in Oregon, Rubinfien went on
to study photography at the California Institute of the Arts (B.F.A, 1974) and Yale University (1976). He then worked for two years as a critic, contributing more
than 125 articles, essays, and reviews to major periodicals, including
Artforum, Art in America, and the
Village Voice.
From 1980-88 Rubinfien made an extensive series of color photographs that concentrated on Asian subjects from Burma, Japan, India, Thailand,
and Indonesia. The series was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1992), the Seibu Art Forum, Tokyo (1993), the Cleveland Museum of Art
(1994), and the Seattle Art Museum (1995) and was published in 1992 as
A Map of the East.
Rubinfien (born in Chicago) has won several awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983, 1992)
and the Asian Cultural Council (1984). He also has had some success as a filmmaker.
The Money Juggler (1988) was screened at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, as part of its New Directors, New
Films festival (1989) and was included in the American Film Institute/Los Angeles International Film Festival
(1989). Rubinfien lives in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. A.W.
The biograhies were written by Karen L. Churchill, Thomas Weston Fels, Maureen A. McKenna, and April Watson.
|
