Artist Biographies

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

Sebastião Salgado
Brazilian, 1944-

One of the most important figures in contemporary documentary photography, Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born and raised in the provincial town of Aimores, Minas Gerais, and educated in economics at São Paulo University. He bought his first camera, a Pentax, in 1970 while completing his doctorate in agricultural economy at the Sorbonne in Paris. One year later, while working for the International Coffee Organization, Salgado turned seriously to social photography. Throughout his career he has maintained an allegiance to the proletariat and a fundamental hope for humanity.

Salgado's epic photographs, often centered on the struggles of people laboring in traditional and fast-disappearing industrial societies, typify the sort of heroic reportage that emerged between the two world wars. His most well-known subjects include the famine in Nigeria and Ethiopia (1973-74), the struggle for independence in Angola (1975-76), the peasant movement in Brazil (1980), and a series on refugees (1993-94). He has also completed other projects in Australia, Central America, and South America.

Salgado has been affiliated with most of the major news agenciesincluding sygma (1974), gamma (1975-79), and magnum (1979)and has received numerous awards, among them the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography from the French Ministry of Culture (1982), the World Press Photo Award, Holland (1985), the Photojournalist of the Year Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (1986, 1988), the Oscar Barnack Award (1985, 1992), and the Paris-Match Gold Award (1993). Several of his booksSahel: L'Homme en Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress, 1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), and Workers (1993)have also been honored. His other publications include Other Americas (1986), Sahel: El Fin del Camino (Sahel: The End of the Road, 1988), Les Cheminots (The Railwaymen, 1989), The Best Photos/As Melhores Fotos (1992), and Photopoche (1993). Salgado lives in Paris. A.W.

August Sander
German, 1876-1964

August Sander (born in Herdorf) became known for his Citizens of the Twentieth Century, an ambitious project to create a photographic document of the German people. Fascinated with photography since his youth, Sander pursued this interest during military service in Trier by serving as an assistant in a photography studio. He then spent two years working in various studios in Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig, and Berlin, also studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Art.

By 1904 Sander was operating his own photography studio in Linz, Austria, producing portraits in a painterly style. A proponent of art photography, he took part in international exhibitions, winning two gold medals in 1904. In late 1909 he moved to Cologne-Lindenthal and began photographing rural farmers in Siegerland and Westerwald. To accommodate his new clientele, he expanded his portrait style to include a simpler, more direct approach.

In the 1920s Sander became interested in producing clear, sharp images printed on glossy paper, an approach he called "exact photography." During this period he formulated his plan to create a photographic study of German types, focusing on individuals from all levels of society. He began making portraits of students, citizens of small towns, farmers, industrialists, politicians, artists, merchants, soldiers, and workers. In 1929 60 of his portraits were published in the book Face of Our Time (Antlitz der Zeit). Five years later the Nazis seized the remaining copies and destroyed the plates. Sander continued to make portraits for his grand project throughout the rest of his life, but after 1934 increasingly turned to landscape and nature studies, as well as architectural photography. M.M.

Charles Sheeler
American, 1883-1965

Philadelphia-born Charles Sheeler was a well-known precisionist painter and photographer. After studying at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900-3), he spent the next three years as a student of painter William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Around 1910 he took up photography as a way to support himself.

Sheeler began as an architectural photographer, documenting buildings for Philadelphia architects, but was soon taking pictures of paintings and other works of art. He continued to paint (in 1913 a group of his works were exhibited in the famous Armory Show in New York) and to photograph, often using his photographs as the basis for paintings. In 1917 his photographs were included in a three-person show along with Paul Strand and Morton Schamberg at Marius de Zayas's Modern Gallery in New York.

Two years later Sheeler moved to New York and in 1920 collaborated with Paul Strand on the avant-garde film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). In 1923 he began working as a staff photographer for Condé Nast publications. Four years later he received his most important commercial commission when Ford Motor Company hired him to photograph its River Rouge plant. A powerful series of images celebrating American industry resulted and were widely published. They also served as an inspiration for a number of his paintings.

In 1939 a small group of Sheeler's photographs were included in a retrospective of his work organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Over the next decade he worked as staff photographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and focused primarily on painting in his own work, especially during the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1959, after suffering a stroke, Sheeler stopped painting and photographing; he died six years later from a second stroke. M.M.

Arthur Siegel
American, 1913-1978

Arthur Siegel is best known for his influential role as a teacher at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, and for his experimental approach to photography. Born in Detroit, he became interested in photography in 1927 and, after studies at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, worked as a freelance photographer. In 1937 Siegel received a scholarship to study at László Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago, where he created his first abstract photographs and established a longstanding relationship with the school. The following year he returned to Detroit and resumed his career as a commercial photographer.

In 1942 Siegel was hired as a photographer for the Office of War Information by Roy Stryker, for whom he had worked briefly earlier at the Farm Security Administration. After two years of war service as a photographer at an air corps base in Illinois (1944-46), Siegel was invited by Moholy-Nagy to establish and direct the photography department at the New Bauhaus, now called the Institute of Design. Over the years he worked with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind to develop one of the most influential photography programs in the country.

In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Siegel focused on photojournalism, producing pictures for Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. He also became known for his skill as an architectural photographer and for his experiments with color photography. In the mid-1960s he returned to teaching full-time at the Institute of Design, becoming head of the photography program again in 1971. M.M.

Aaron Siskind
American, 1903-1991

Born in New York City, Aaron Siskind inspired many photographers through the example of his own work and his instruction at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and at the Rhode Island School of Design. Graduating from City College of New York in 1926, Siskind taught English in the city's public schools for 23 years. He took up photography as a hobby in 1930 and two years later learned to process and print his own images. Around this time he joined the Photo League, an organization of socially concerned photographers who promoted documentary photography. Siskind headed the league's project focusing on Harlem (Harlem Document) and also produced his own series Tabernacle City, Bucks County and The Most Crowded Block in the World.

In the early 1940s, Siskind's work gradually shifted from a social documentary approach to a more abstract and personal style. During summers on Martha's Vineyard and in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he began photographing natural objects close up, eliminating deep, naturalistic space and concentrating on the primacy of the flat, two-dimensional surface of the photograph. As a result of his experiments, he came to be interested in the photograph as a physical object in its own right, rather than as a reflection of the outside world.

In 1947 Siskind exhibited his new work at the Egan Gallery in New York, where the paintings of the abstract expressionists were shown. He became friends with painter Franz Kline and other members of his circle and through their support published his first book, Aaron Siskind: Photographs (1959). In the 1950s Siskind also began to establish himself as a photography teacher. He gained his first experience as a part-time instructor at Trenton College (1949-51), then taught during the summer of 1951 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There he worked with Harry Callahan, who invited him to join the staff of the Institute of Design in Chicago. Siskind taught at the institute from 1951-71, when he left to join the Rhode Island School of Design where Callahan now headed the department of photography. Siskind continued to teach at the school until his retirement in 1976.

Over the years Siskind remained interested in exploring the formal and abstract qualities of photography, becoming known for his closeup, abstracted views of rocks, peeling paint, bits of graffiti, torn signs, and other objects. He exhibited widely, and in 1982 his photographs were featured in a major retrospective, Aaron Siskind: Fifty Years, organized by the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. M.M.

W. Eugene Smith
American, 1918-1978

W. Eugene Smith (born in Wichita, Kansas) was a master photojournalist known for his many photo essays in Life magazine. After working as a part-time newspaper photographer while in high school, Smith studied briefly at the University of Notre Dame. He then moved to New York City in 1937, where his first job was with Newsweek. After a year at the magazine and a period of freelance work, he signed a contract with Life in 1939, but resigned two years later. His subsequent career as a war correspondent (1942-45) was interrupted after he was severely wounded by shell fire.

Smith's first photograph after two years of convalescence, The Walk to Paradise Garden, became one of his most well known and was featured in the exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1955). From 1947-54 he was once more associated with Life, producing a number of major photographic essays: "Country Doctor" (1948), "Spanish Village" (1951), "Nurse Midwife" (1951), and "A Man of Mercy" (focusing on Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1954). In 1954 he again resigned from Life after a disagreement over the handling of the Schweitzer essay.

The following year Smith joined magnum Photos and undertook a major photographic study of the city of Pittsburgh, receiving two fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1956, 1957). In 1957 he also began work on a new project, a series of photographs taken from his studio window. Smith spent several years in Japan in the 1960s (traveling there initially to make photographs for Hitachi Limited) and returned in 1971 to work on the powerful and moving Minamata photo essay, which portrayed a small Japanese fishing village whose inhabitants were poisoned by industrial pollution (first published in Life and then as a book). Until his death in 1978, Smith continued to photograph, teach, and exhibit. M.M.

Kenneth Snelson
American, 1927-

Photographer Kenneth Snelson is perhaps better known for his large-scale outdoor sculptures made of tubular steel and cable. Piqued by his father's trade in high-quality German cameras, his interest in photography began as a child.

After studying at the University of Oregon (1946-48), Black Mountain College in North Carolina (where his teachers included Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Willem de Kooning, 1948-49), and the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (1950), Snelson studied with Fernand Léger at the Académie Montmartre in Paris (1951). Upon his return, he worked as a cinematographer in order to pay for his sculpture. He began creating panoramic photographs in 1975 with the purchase of a Wide-Lux camera that allowed a 140 view. In 1983 he began using a Cirkut 16 camera, which produced negatives 40 centimeters x 3 meters in size and allowed a 360 view.

Born in Pendleton, Oregon, Snelson has taught at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the School of the Visual Arts in New York, and at Southern Illinois University and Yale University. He has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts (1971), the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1975), a Deutsches Akademishes Austauschdienst (daad) Fellowship, Berlin (1975), the American Institute of Architects Medal (1981), an honorary doctorate from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1985), and the American Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1987). Snelson lives in New York. A.W.

Frederick Sommer
American, b. Italy, 1905-

"Aesthetics celebrates art as the poetic logic of form," Frederick Sommer has written. This complex ideology runs throughout his work, linking his early black-and-white straight images and his later anatomical collages to a cosmic philosophy informed by myth, art, literature, science, music, and life experience. Sommer's photographsprinted with painstaking attention to focus, contrast, and sizerange in subject from straight portraiture to nudes, landscapes, found objects, statues, animal carcasses, peeling walls, and cut-paper sculptures. A friend of surrealist artist Max Ernst, Sommer also explores psychic territory in his art, relying on an emblematic depiction of reality to open the doors of the imagination. Mortal corruptibility, death, and beauty are his universal themes.

Born in Angri, Italy, Sommer grew up in Rio de Janeiro. He earned an M.A. in landscape architecture from Cornell University (1926-27) and married Frances Watson one year later. They returned to Rio, but moved to Switzerland after Sommer was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After his recuperation, they immigrated to the United States in 1931, and Sommer became a naturalized citizen in 1939. Although he painted and occasionally photographed between 1931-35, Sommer's serious efforts at photography began after meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1935. His first images of the Arizona landscape were made in 1936 with an 8 x 10-inch view camera.

Sommer has lectured extensively on photography and his philosophies, particularly at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology (1957-58). He also worked as the fine arts coordinator at Prescott College (1966-71). Since 1961 Sommer has concentrated on abstract images and cut-paper collages derived from fragments extracted from medical engravings and anatomical texts. He lives in Prescott, Arizona. A.W.

Michael Spano
American, 1949-

Michael Spano fuses the sociological intrigue of street photography with formal manipulations of the photographic medium to explore the urban environment and its inhabitants. Panoramic and sequential views, photograms, and solarized double exposures have all served as formats for his imagery.

Born in New York City and educated at Queens College (B.A., 1976) and Yale University School of Art (M.F.A. in photography, 1978), Spano has been awarded a New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1982), fellowships from the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation (1984) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (1985), and an Art Matters Grant (1988). He has had one-person exhibitions at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (1984), the Memphis Brooks Museum (1988), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1990). Spano lives in New York. A.W.

Edward Steichen
American, b. Luxembourg, 1879-1973

His long and illustrious career places Edward Steichen among the major figures of 20th-century photography. Born Eduard Jean Steichen in Luxembourg, Steichen moved with his family to the United States in 1881, was naturalized a citizen in 1900, and changed the spelling of his first name in 1918. Educated in Wisconsin, he showed an early interest in art. He studied at the Milwaukee Art Students League and was an apprentice lithographer; later he studied painting at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Steichen took his first photograph in 1896. Early recognition came in the Second Philadelphia Salon of 1899, and he was encouraged by Clarence H. White. Shortly thereafter, while on his way to Europe, he met Alfred Stieglitz, who bought three of his prints. In 1900 he participated in the New School of American Photography exhibition in London. Steichen's first one-person show, which included paintings as well as photographs, was held in Paris in 1902. He helped to found the Photo-Secession and played an important role in the life and design of its galleries, programs, and publications, including the decision to exhibit international works in a variety of media.

Steichen was the commander of aerial photography for the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War. After the war, he became chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and a well-known portraitist. During World War II he was in charge of all navy combat photography and was also responsible for the exhibitions Road to Victory (1942) and Power in the Pacific (1945) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. These, along with his 1955 show, The Family of Man, established a new, more popular form of photographic exhibition. In 1947 he was made director of the museum's department of photography, a position he held until 1962.

In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of Steichen's work. The following year he received the Medal of Freedom from President John F. Kennedy. His photographs have been represented in many exhibitions and publications, including the book Steichen the Photographer, with a text by his brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg. T.W.F.

Ralph Steiner
American, 1899-1986

Ralph Steiner (born in Cleveland) was a modernist photographer and filmmaker known for his clear, sharply focused images of everyday America. Having developed an early interest in photography, Steiner spent the year following graduation from Dartmouth College studying at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York (1921-22). He worked as a plate engraver at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, then undertook a career as a magazine and advertising photographer.

Deeply impressed by the technical quality of Paul Strand's pictures, Steiner spent the summer and early fall of 1929 improving his own technical skills. That same year he also began experimenting with filmmaking, producing the avant-garde film H2O. During the 1930s he continued to make films, producing Surf and Seaweed, Mechanical Principles, and Pie in the Sky. In 1935 Steiner joined Strand as a cameraman on Pare Lorentz's documentary film, The Plow that Broke the Plains, and several years later collaborated with photographer Willard Van Dyke on The City, a documentary shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

In the early 1940s Steiner moved to Hollywood, where he worked for mgm and rko. Upon his return to New York later in the decade, he resumed his career as a commercial photographer. During the 1960s he was able to spend more time doing his own work, producing both photographs and films. His autobiography, A Point of View (1978), was followed by a book of his cloud photographs, In Pursuit of Clouds (1985). M.M.

Alfred Stieglitz
American, 1864-1946

Photographer, writer, publisher, gallery owner, leader of the Photo-Secession, and mentor to numerous other photographers, Alfred Stieglitz was a pivotal force during the late 19th and 20th centuries in promoting photography in America and gaining its acceptance as an art form. He also pioneered in bringing modern art to this country through the avant-garde European and American work presented in the pages of his well-known journal, Camera Work, and at his gallery, "291."

Stieglitz (born in Hoboken, New Jersey) first became interested in photography in the early 1880s while studying mechanical engineering in Germany at the polytechnic institute in Charlottenburg (now a suburb of Berlin). Following a class with the great photochemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, Stieglitz turned his attention to photography and soon began writing technical articles on the subject for European journals. In 1887 he won a prize for a photograph submitted to the Holiday Work Competition sponsored by Amateur Photographer magazine.

When he returned to the United States three years later, Stieglitz became a partner in the Photochrome Engraving Company; running a business did not interest him, however, and his association with the company lasted only five years. In addition to pursuing his own photographic work and writing articles on pictorial photography for various American journals during the 1890s, Stieglitz became editor of the American Amateur Photographer in 1893. Four years later he took on the editorship of Camera Notes, the journal of the newly formed Camera Club of New York.

In 1902 Stieglitz organized the first Photo-Secession exhibition at the National Arts Club in New York, launching an organization that was to play a major role in the fight for recognition of photography as an art form. At the end of the year he began publishing Camera Work, the journal of the Photo-Secession, which soon became one of the premier photographic publications of the day (the first issue, dated January 1903, was published in December 1902).

In 1905, with the assistance of painter and photographer Edward Steichen, Stieglitz opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The gallery, which soon became known as "291," provided Stieglitz with a center from which to promote art photography and exhibit the work of its finest practitioners. In addition to presenting work by the most advanced American and European pictorial photographers, Stieglitz began showing the work of modern European artists, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cézanne. He also organized numerous exhibitions of art photography for museums and expositions in this country and in Europe, including the famous 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo.

After closing "291" in 1917, Stieglitz focused on his own work, beginning a series of portraits of artist Georgia O'Keeffe (whom he married in 1924) and a series of cloud pictures called Equivalents, which he exhibited in the 1920s at the Anderson Gallery in New York. During these years he also produced a group of photographs of New York City skyscrapers, as well as images of Lake George, New York.

Stieglitz continued to photograph into the 1930s. He also ran two galleries from the mid-1920s until his death: the Intimate Gallery (1925-29) and An American Place (1929-46). Both galleries presented the work of a small group of American modernists, including O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, as well as Stieglitz's photographs. M.M.

Paul Strand
American, 1890-1976

Paul Strand (born in New York City) was an influential advocate of the straight approach in creative photography. While a student at the Ethical Culture School in New York, Strand studied photography with Lewis Hine (1907-8). In 1908 he joined the Camera Club of New York and three years later traveled through Europe, making softly focused, manipulated photographs in the popular pictorial style. In the fall of 1911 Strand established himself as a freelance commercial photographer in New York and two years later began visiting the exhibitions of modern art at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession galleries.

Between 1914-17, stimulated by his contact with Stieglitz and avant-garde American and European art, Strand abandoned pictorialism for images that expressed an interest in formal concerns and the dynamism of contemporary urban life. He experimented with abstraction and movement and candid portraiture of people on the street. Excited by Strand's innovative work, Stieglitz exhibited his pictures at "291" in 1916 and featured them in the final two issues of Camera Work (October 1916; June 1917). In 1917 Strand expressed his belief in a pure photographic aesthetic, stressing the objectivity of the medium and its ability to produce "a range of almost infinite tonal values which lie beyond the skill of the human hand."

The following year Strand served as an x-ray technician in the Army Medical Corps. After his year of service, he returned to New York and in 1920 collaborated with painter/photographer Charles Sheeler on the avant-garde film Manhatta (originally titled New York the Magnificent). Throughout the 1920s Strand made his living as a filmmaker, only occasionally making photographs. He pursued both film and creative photography in the 1930s and early 1940s; by 1945, however, when his images were featured in a one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, still photography had once more become his primary focus. After visiting France in 1950 he decided to settle there, and over the following two decades traveled and photographed in Europe and Africa.

Strand's work has been widely exhibited. Retrospectives have been mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1945), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1971, and tour), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1973), and numerous traveling exhibitions have been organized, including Paul Strand: An American Vision by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1990). He was named an Honorary Member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (1963) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973). M.M.

Karl F. Struss
American, 1886-1981

Born and raised in New York City, Karl Fischer Struss was an important early pictorialist and a cofounder of the Pictorial Photographers of America. He was also a member of the Photo-Secession, publishing his works in Camera Work (April 1912), and a photographer for publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Bazaar.

A student of Clarence H. White, Struss was influenced by both White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. He developed his own style, however, an elegant synthesis of random qualities with formal composition. Struss experimented with various technical processes. He developed multiple platinum printing to enhance the depth of shadows and in 1909 designed the Struss Pictorial lens, which entered commercial production in 1915.

Shortly after the First World War, Struss moved to Hollywood, where he became a successful cinematographer. He worked first for Cecil B. De Mille and later freelanced for both independent and major studios until his retirement in 1970. Among his film credits are Ben Hur (1926), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), and the Chaplin classics The Great Dictator (1940) and Limelight (1952). In 1928 Struss received an Academy Award for his work on De Mille's film Sunrise. T.W.F.

Thomas Struth
German, 1954-

Thomas Struth (born in Geldern) relies on the optical precision and detailed resolution of photography to explore social and psychological aspects of the contemporary urban metropolis. A student of Gerhard Richter and Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, Struth inherited from his instructors a similar conceptual approach. His work of the early 1980saustere black-and-white images of buildings and city streets devoid of human activitysuggests urban malaise and, at the same time, a sense of soulful detachment from the environment.

For his later works, Struth moved into color and greatly increased the scale of his photographs, invoking a more participatory relationship between image and viewer. His scenes expanded to include people interacting in public spaces such as museums and churches, or posed in family portraits.

Struth has exhibited internationally, with one-person shows at the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art (1987), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1992), the Saint Louis Art Museum (1993), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1994), and the Kunstmuseum, Bonn (1995). His monographs include Thomas Struth, Unbewusste Orte/Unconscious Places (1987), Thomas Struth (1989), Thomas Struth Photographs (1990), Thomas Struth (1991), Thomas Struth: Portraits (1992), Thomas Struth, Museum Photographs (1993), and Thomas Struth: Strangers and Friends: Photographs 1986-1992 (1994). He lives in Düsseldorf. A.W.

Josef Sudek
Czechoslovakian, b. Austria-Hungary, 1896-1976

One of the best known Czechoslovakian photographers of the 20th century, Josef Sudek was born in Kolín nad Labem, a small town near Prague. In his youth he was apprenticed to a bookbinder but, following the loss of his right arm during World War I, took up photography as a profession. Sudek became a member of Prague's Bohemian Amateur Photography Association in 1921 and the following year entered the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague, where he studied photography (1922-24). In 1924 Sudek and his friend, photographer Jaromír Funke, joined Adolf Schneeberger in founding the Czech Photographic Society ( sa).

Sudek worked in Prague all his life, opening a studio there in the 1920s. Among his earliest photographs were a series of soft-focus views of the final stages of construction of Saint Vitus Cathedral. Over the next 50 years, he photographed familiar surroundings, producing hundreds of images of the streets and buildings of Prague and objects in his garden and studio, including a series of photographs taken through his studio window. He also made many landscape pictures, photographing in the great Mioní Forest Preserve. He also was successful as an advertising and commercial photographer.

Beginning in the 1920s, Sudek took part in many exhibitions; his work has also been featured in several one-person shows, including retrospectives at George Eastman House, Rochester (1974), the International Center of Photography, New York (1977), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990). He was the first photographer honored with the title Artist of Merit (1961) by the Czech government, which also awarded him the Order of Work (1966). M.M.

Hiroshi Sugimoto
Japanese, 1948-

The photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto explore the connections between modern and ancient worlds. His early interior views of unpeopled cinemas, aglow with the eerie light of a projected film, suggest modern-day shrines. With similar intentions, he began to photograph in museums, particularly exhibits that featured life-size taxidermy animals and wax human figures.

Since 1977 Sugimoto has traveled the world to photograph barren seascapes. These subjects, which have become his hallmark, are shown with subtle variations in time of day, horizon line, and weather conditionsachieving from a distance the effect of a color-field painting by encouraging viewers to lose themselves in the haze. The black-and-white format, however, is a continual reminder of both the actuality of the subject and its perilous environmental state.

As a child, Sugimoto (born in Tokyo) took up photography with a fervor. He graduated from Saint Paul's University, Tokyo (B.A., 1970), leaving Japan for the United States to study at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles (B.F.A., 1972). In 1974 he moved to New York City, opening an antiques business before launching full-time into freelance photography.

In addition to a one-person exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1989), Sugimoto has shown his work at the Palais des Beaux Arts, Charlerol, Belgium (1993), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1993, and tour), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1995). His awards include a New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1977) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1980) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). Sugimoto lives in New York and Tokyo. A.W.

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