Oliver Gagliani - Master of Large Format Photography

 

 Oliver Gagliani  (1917 - 2002) was a master of large format photography. His darkroom work and proficiency of the Zone System great skill and technique. In 1945, Gagliani viewed a retrospective of the work of Paul Strand at the San Francisco Museum of Art. From this point on, Gagliani saw photography as a fine art and began his journey of being mostly a self-taught photographer. Gagliani studied under and worked with some of the most influential photographers of the 20th century including, Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernhard, Minor White, Paul Caponigro, Cole Weston and Paul Strand. In his later years he conducted photographic workshops in Virginia City, Nevada.

 

Marilyn Monroe - Black Series 1956 - Milton H. Greene

 Milton H. Greene (March 14, 1922 – August 8, 1985) was an American fashion and celebrity photographer and film and television producer, best known for his photo shoots with Marilyn Monroe.Greene initially established himself in high fashion photography in the 1940s and 1950s. His fashion shots appeared in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Greene then turned to portraits of celebrities. He photographed many high-profile personalities in the 1950s and 1960s, including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Sammy Davis, Jr., Catherine Deneuve, Marlene Dietrich, and Judy Garland.

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Jazz Photographer Herman Leonard

Herman Leonard (March 6, 1923, in Allentown, Pennsylvania – August 14, 2010, in Los Angeles, California) was an American photographer known for his unique images of jazz icons.

 "President Bill Clinton has called Herman Leonard, "The greatest jazz photographer in the history of the genre." Born March 6, 1923 and raised in Allentown, PA, at age 9, Herman Leonard witnessed an image being developed in his brother's darkroom and became enthralled with the magic of photography. As the official photographer for his high school, Herman quickly learned that with a camera in hand, he had an "open sesame" to people and events, that his shyness might have prevented him from experiencing. When it came time for college, Herman chose Ohio University, “The only university at the time that could offer me a degree in Photography”. His college studies were interrupted from 1943-1945, as Herman joined the United States Army and was sent to Burma with the 13th Mountain Medical Battalion. He had hoped to be a field photographer, but was ironically assigned as a combat anesthetist when he failed a test which required him to identify the chemical ingredients of film developer. After the war, Herman returned to college and graduated in 1947 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree.


Herman's most influential teacher was master portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh, with whom Herman spent a year as an apprentice to in Ottawa, Canada from 1947-1948. Herman assisted Karsh in the darkroom and with photographic sittings including, Martha Graham, Harry Truman, and Albert Einstein.



 In 1948, Herman's passion for jazz brought him to New York City's Greenwich Village, where he set up a small studio at 220 Sullivan Street. He made his way into the swinging clubs of Broadway, 52nd Street and Harlem. With the camera as his free ticket, he offered to shoot publicity stills of the jazz artists for admission. While shooting at The Royal Roost and Birdland, he photographed and developed friendships with some of the greats of jazz history, including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and many more. Many of his photos eventually ended up on the covers of jazz albums while working for producer Norman Granz, as well as in Downbeat and Metronome magazines.In 1956 Leonard was chosen by Marlon Brando to be his personal photographer for an extensive research trip throughout the Far East. At the conclusion of the trip, Leonard had been bitten by the travel bug and headed for Paris, France. He continued to photograph the prolific jazz scene, with many of the American jazz artists now living there. Working for French recording label Barclay Records, he also photographed many French recording artists such as Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel, Eddy Mitchell and Johnny Hallyday. He also became the European photographer for Playboy Magazine. Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s his work focused primarily on fashion and advertising at his studio in Paris’ chic Neuilly-sur-Seine neighborhood.

 Herman's jazz photographs, now collector's items, are a unique record of the jazz scene of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The Smithsonian claims 155 original Herman Leonard photographic prints in its permanent collection, where they are considered as essential to American music history as Benny Goodman's clarinet or Louis Armstrong's horn. Herman's work is also represented in numerous public collections including, Jazz at Lincoln Center, NY, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, LA, and the George Eastman House, NY, as well as the private collections of Sir Elton John, Bruce Bernard, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and President Bill Clinton.

The Herman Leonard Jazz Archive was established in 2007 and in 2008 was awarded a GRAMMY® Foundation grant for archiving and preservation. This project was successful in digitally archiving Leonard's vast catalog of over 35,000 negatives, comprising a visual documentation of America's original art form, and preserving it for future generations. Later in 2008, Herman was presented with the coveted Lucie Award for Portraiture from his dear friend Tony Bennett at an awards ceremony at Lincoln Center in NYC. Tony remarked, "He is my favorite artist of any technique, he's a painter with a camera." Herman also appeared on NBC's The Today Show, and in a BBC documentary SAVING JAZZ, which chronicled his experiences following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Leonard returned to his alma mater of Ohio University as the commencement speaker for the graduating class of 2009, and was presented with an Honorary Doctorate.

(hermanleonard.com)

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Industrial photography O.Winston Link

Ogle Winston Link (December 16, 1914 – January 30, 2001), known commonly as O. Winston Link, was an American photographer. He is best known for his black-and-white photography and sound recordings of the last days of steam locomotive railroading on the Norfolk & Western in the United States in the late 1950s. A commercial photographer, Link helped establish rail photography as a hobby. He also pioneered night photography, producing several well known examples including Hotshot Eastbound, a photograph of a steam train passing a drive-in movie theater, and Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole showing a train crossing a bridge above children bathing.

While in Staunton, Virginia, for an industrial photography job in 1955, Link's longstanding love of railroads became focused on the nearby Norfolk and Western Railway line. N&W was the last major (Class I) railroad to make the transition from steam to diesel motive power and had refined its use of steam locomotives, earning a reputation for "precision transportation." Link took his first night photograph of the road on January 21, 1955, in Waynesboro, Virginia. On May 29, 1955 the N&W announced its first conversion to diesel and Link's work became a documentation of the end of the steam era. He returned to Virginia for about twenty visits to continue photographing the N&W. His last night shot was taken in 1959 and the last of all in 1960, the year the road completed the transition to diesel, by which time he had accumulated 2400 negatives on the project.
Although it was entirely self-financed, Link's work was encouraged and facilitated by N&W officials, from President Robert Hall Smith downwards. Besides the locomotives, he captured the people of the N&W performing their jobs on the railroad and in the trackside communities. Some of his images were of the massive Roanoke Shops, where the company had long built and maintained its own locomotives.Link's images were always meticulously set up and posed, and he chose to take most of his railroad photographs at night. He said "I can't move the sun — and it's always in the wrong place — and I can't even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting." Although others, including Philip Hastings and Jim Shaughnessy, had photographed locomotives at night before, Link's vision required him to develop new techniques for flash photography of such large subjects. For instance, the movie theater image Hotshot Eastbound (Iaeger, West Virginia), photographed on August 2, 1956 [negative NW1103], used 42 #2 flashbulbs and one #0 fired simultaneously. Link, with an assistant such as George Thom, had to lug all his equipment into position and wire it up: this was done in series so any failure would prevent a picture being taken at all; and in taking night shots of moving trains the right position for the subject could only be guessed at. Link used a 4 x 5 Graphic View view camera with black and white film, from which he produced silver gelatin prints.Wikipedia

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Simon Marsden

Sir Simon Neville Llewelyn Marsden, 4th Baronet (1 December 1948 – 22 January 2012) was an English photographer and author. He is known best for his uncommon black-and-white photographs of allegedly haunted houses and places throughout Europe. He succeeded his brother as baronet of Grimsby in Lincolnshire in 1997.Marsden's particular interest was "eerie" motifs like graveyards and old ruins, as well as the legends and tales that are often connected with these places. Yet the gloomy atmosphere of Marsden's pictures is not based on careful choice of the motifs alone, but to the same degree on Marsden's photography technique, which included the use of infrared film.
Marsden’s photographs already became world-famous and are exhibited at a large number of museums.Wikipedia

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