Lewis Hine
Hine was born in Wisconsin and, after a series of jobs following high school and some training in art, he enrolled briefly at the University of Chicago. He took his students out into the country to photograph nature, but he also led them all around New York, photographing the economic life of the city and its inhabitants. One of Hine's strongest interests was the immigrants who were coming through Ellis Island in such great numbers, arriving from Russia, Ireland, Italy, and other lands, and settling in New York at that time. Hine was working within a tradition of documentarypPhotography that had been established in the late 1880s by Jacob Riss, who also focused on social conditions on Mantattan's Lower East Side, where many immigrants settled. Beyond his Ellis island and Lower East Side work, Hine was interested in furthering social reform and in changing the ways in which Americans viewed the working class.
Richard Leach Maddox (Gelatin Dry Plate Process)
Dr. Richard Maddox, an English physician, worked on photo-micrography and wrote on various photographic topics, but it was not until 1871 that his greatest contribution to the science of photography was made. Up to his time, wet collodion plates were being used. These required that coating, exposure and development be done whilst the solution was still wet, and soon the need for pre-prepared plates became evident.In an article in the British Journal of Photography for 8 September 1871 he suggested a process whereby the sensitising chemicals could be coated on a glass plate in a Gelatinemulsion, instead of wet collodion.In 1901 Maddox received the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal for inventions that led to the foundation of the dry plate and film industry.
George Eastman - (Rolled Photographic Film)
George Eastman invented a dry-plate photographic system, and later the system of film on rolls of gelatin-coated paper, which effectively superceded the previous system of chemicals, glass tanks, and heavy plate holders that kept photography out of the reach of all but professionals and the most dedicated hobbyists. "What we were doing", he later said, "was not merely making dry plates, but [making] photography an everyday affair."
In 1888 he invented the "snapshot" camera, under the name Kodak. One of the first brand names invented from nonsense syllables, Eastman said he called it Kodak because he was fond of the sound of the letter K. As his Kodak cameras and film rolls (manufactured for use in either his own or competitors' cameras) became more and more popular and profitable, Eastman pioneered an employee dividend system that made his workers part-owners of the firm, and he gave millions of dollars to the Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Rochester, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and smaller but still generous sums to the Tuskegee Institute.
Alfred Stieglitz
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1864, and schooled as an engineer in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York in 1890 determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York—an association of amateur photography enthusiasts—Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and-file membership of the Camera Club began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography. Most members of the group made extensive use of elaborate, labor-intensive techniques that underscored the role of the photographer's hand in making photographic prints, but Stieglitz favored a slightly different approach in his own work.
No comments:
Post a Comment