Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe is known for his elegantly expressive black-and-white studies of male and female nudes, flowers, and celebrity portraits. He credited sculpture as an influence on his work and used traditional techniques of direct lighting and sharp focus to produce sleekly ravishing effects and gleaming surfaces. His photographs include homoerotic images, often glamorized and disturbing, which made him a controversial figure. Soon after his death from AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., canceled a traveling retrospective of his work in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a debate in Congress over public funding by the National Endowment for the Arts of works deemed “objectionable” by fundamentalist religious groups and political conservatives.

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, LGBT, 1900s, American Photographers, Robert Mapplethorpe

Charles Marville

Charles Marville was initially trained as a painter, engraver and illustrator before he became a landscape and architecture photographer. Many of his works were made in Italy, Germany and Algeria. He was commissioned to document some of the ancient architecture in Paris during the 1850's and was hired by the Musee du Louvre to make reproductions of artwork in the collection. Marville was made the official photographer in Paris in 1862.

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019French, Male, 1800s, Charles Marville

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti’s photographs blend formal rigor with social awareness. The Italian-born artist immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She acted in plays and silent films, and worked as an artist’s model during her first years in the country. In 1920 she met photographer Edward Weston, who mentored her and was a great influence on her subsequent work. By 1921 they had become lovers, and in 1923 they moved together to Mexico City, which had become a cosmopolitan center in the interwar years. There, cultural and political expatriates like Weston and Modotti, Sergei Eisenstein, and Leon Trotsky moved in bohemian circles with Mexican intellectuals and artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Modotti and Weston opened a portrait studio in the city.

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Italian, Female, 1900s, Tina Modotti

Wright Morris

Wright Morris was a renowned writer and effective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, 1900s, American Photographers

Richard Murai

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Male, 2000s, American Photographers, Richard Murai

Eadweard Muybridge

This important English photographer pioneered work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He emigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge's experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse's gait all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his camera lacked a fast shutter. The project was then interrupted while Muybridge was being tried for the murder of his wife's lover. Although he was acquitted, he found it expedient to travel for a number of years in Mexico and Central America, making publicity photographs for the Union Pacific Railroad, a company owned by Stanford.

MKim KirbyMay 31, 2019Zoopraxiscope, Male, 1800s, British Photographers, Eadweard Muybridge

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