Holiday Wishlist 2015

Sid Avery’s candid snapshot portraiture offers a glimpse into the off-screen lives of some of the 20th century’s golden-age Hollywood’s most celebrated icons, including James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, and Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward amongst others.

Sid Avery also famously photographed the original 1960 cast of “Ocean’s Eleven” and later came out of retirement to recreate that photograph with the cast of 2001’s remake. Sid Avery’s early photographs appeared in many magazines, among them the Saturday Evening Post, Look, and Colliers and his portraits hang...

Carolyn Carr (b. 1966) received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1992. Since she has been actively engaged as a painter, photographer, sculptor, and installation artist.

A multi-generational Southerner, Carolyn Carr's photography evolves out of her interest in understanding her complicated lineage. Carolyn Carr makes stand alone objects that are often arranged using the various paradigms of domestic interiors. Thus far she has recreated a kitchen, a vestibule, a hallway, a photographer's studio, and a fictitious story in photographs all to illustrate the challenges between cultural and personal identity.

In addition to her studio practice, artist Carolyn...

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, William Christenberry (1936 – 2016) grew up in a south where old road signs, deteriorating buildings, and dirt roads shaped his childhood memories. Working in a wide variety of media — including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, and assemblage — William Christenberry is known for his artistic exploration of the psychology of place, in particular the Black Belt region of west-central Alabama. Originally focused on painting, William Christenberry moved to New York City in 1961 and there met Walker Evans, whose celebrated FSA photographs of the Depression-era South, many taken in Christenberry’s Hale County, were a particular...

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, American photographer Bruce Davidson (1933) first worked in a basement darkroom his single mother built when he was 10. Despite studying at Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, he got drafted into the army and while stationed near Paris, Bruce Davidson met Henri Cartier-Bresson, the cooperative photography agency Magnum Photos founder and an accomplished photographer himself. By 1958, Bruce Davidson had left the service, started a freelance gig photographing for LIFE magazine, and became a full member at Magnum. Although considered prolific through the stretch of his career, Bruce Davidson's most resonating series are...

Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995) was a German-American photographer and photojournalist. Photographer Alfred Esienstaedt is renowned for his candid photographs, frequently made using various models of a 35mm Leica rangefinder camera. Alfred Eisenstaedt is best known for his photograph capturing the celebration of V-J Day, Times Square,1945. Over the years, Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured over 2500 assignments (86 covers) for LIFE of current events and influential people of the twentieth century, from John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and Winston Churchill to name a few.

Alfred Esienstaedt's photos have been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney...

Ormond Gigli was born in New York City in 1925. He became famous early on during the 1950s for his photographs of theatre, celebrities, dance, exotic persons & places. Ormond Gigli’s photography appeared prominently on covers & editorial pages of Life, Time, Paris Match, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and other major international publications. Ormond Gigli’s groundbreaking portraits include Sophia Loren (at age 21), Anita Ekberg, Marcel Duchamp, John F. Kennedy, Halston, Gina Lollobrigida, Diana Vreeland, Giancarlo Giannini, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Sir Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, Richard Burton, & many more. Most of these images have not been widely seen...

Josef Hoflehner (1955-present) is an Austrian photographer whose work often focuses on the solitude and beauty of nature. Regularly featuring stunning—and sometimes haunting—landscapes with the occasional glimpse of encroaching humanity, Josef Hoflehner’s photos provides the viewer with an introspective and refreshing way of seeing the natural world. Much of his work focuses on solitary landscapes, and he has traveled to some of the most remote corners of the world to places like Antarctica, Vietnam, China, Japan, Yemen and Iceland in order to take photos. “I like empty spaces,” he said. “I like to mix up or change my style often,...

Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) was in Weissenfels-an-der-Salle, Germany. Originally channeling inspiration for shooting fashion from Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst eventually developed his own style, particularly manipulating light to highlight subjects’ features. By 1931, Horst P. Horst was shooting regularly for French Vogue, as fostered through a friendship with Hoyningen-Huene. Eight years later he made one of his most famous works, Mainbocher Corset, which featured a woman’s back strapped into a corset and published in Vogue. Horst P. Horst primarily worked in the studio, sometimes taking days to strike the right balance of light and shadow to make his...

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who have been working together since they met while attending art school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s. Both were born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. These may include documentary-style panoramic and square photographs that combine absurdist fantasy and bogus anthropology; elaborately crafted artifact, costumes and sculpture, often constructed of unlikely materials such as bread or fur, painting and drawings ranging...

Born in New York City a year before the Depression started, French photographer and filmmaker William Klein’s (1928 - present) first forays into art were through painting. Although he eventually switched gears towards the camera, he never formally studied photography, which explains his abstract approach. William Klein won his first camera during a poker game in 1946 while part of the U.S. Army stationed in Germany. He worked a brief stint as assistant to French painter and sculptor Fernand Léger’s in Paris in 1948. William Klein’s photography in fashion has appeared in magazines, books and documentary and feature films. William...

Herman Leonard was born in Allentown, PA in 1923. At the young age of 9, he witnessed an image being developed in his brother’s darkroom and became enthralled with the magic of photography.

In 1947, after a stint in Burma during WWII, Herman Leonard graduated from Ohio University with a BFA in Photography, the only school in the nation to offer such a degree at the time. He then drove straight to Yousuf Karsh’s house in Ottowa, Canada and asked for a job. Karsh wasn’t hiring but was impressed enough with young Herman Leonard to take him on as an...

Chris Lowell began a career in street photography in 2005, inspired by the photographic styles of the early street photographers: Frank, Erwitt, Evans, Ronis, Cartier-Bresson. He documented urban street scenes across the world – from Paris to Marrakech, Florence to Port-au-Prince – always trying to evoke a sense of relatability and humanity in his subjects. Taking pictures with the same 35mm rangefinders as his influences, Chris Lowell became quickly versed in the ability to shoot without thinking, to let impulse snap the shutter.

In 2009, after re-discovering the early photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and the library of southern portraits from...

Lyle Owerko is a renowned San Francisco and New York based photographer, filmmaker and self-professed “pop-culture junkie,” Lyle Owerko’s photography and editorials projects regularly take the globe-trotting artist to Africa, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Mongolia and Central America. His heart-wrenching editorial photograph of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center appeared on the cover of Time magazine and was called one of the 40 most important magazine covers in the last 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors. Lyle Owerko’s photography has been featured in Communication Arts magazine, The New York Times, The Village Voice, New...

Humanitarian photographer Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born into segregated Kansas in 1912. A fellowship chronicling extreme poverty and social conditions for the Farm Security Administration, under the mentorship of Roy Stryker, informed his developing, expressive style. Gordon Parks also worked as a filmmaker and memoirist, breaking color boundaries across the board. He captured arresting images highlighting deeply problematic oppression and racism across the nation, including the notable American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942), featuring F.S.A. chairperson Ella Watson posed with a broom and mop, staring blankly ahead and standing in front of an unfurled American flag. Gordon Parks turned toward freelance...

American photographer Steve Schapiro (1934-present) was born and raised in New York City and discovered photography at age 9. The photojournalist is often celebrated for his work documenting the American Civil Rights Movement and the Selma to Montgomery march. LIFE Magazine called Steve Schapiro to Memphis to document the tragedy unfolding after Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. Although typically associated with civil justice documentary work, Steve Schapiro created some iconic portraits of figures like James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Ray Charles, and more, all of which appear in his book Heroes (2007); the collection won an Art Directors Club Cube...

After JFK’s death, a selection of Mark Shaw’s photographs was published as a best selling book, The John F. Kennedy’s: A Family Album . The book was re-published in 2000 by Rizzoli with new additions, including never before seen color images.

Mark Shaw also contributed to two other books: The Catch and the Feast features his photographs of wild game, both live and cooked; Messenger of Peace is a photo journal of Pope Paul Vl’s visit to the United States.

Mark Shaw’s images of the Kennedys were widely used in Jacqueline Kennedy: the White House Years , an exhibition of...

Fine art photographer Vee Speers (1962-present) was born in Newcastle, Australia. She is best known for her painterly and surreal portraits. Though subject matter varies, Vee Speers tends to investigate themes related to youth, glamour, sex and immortality. She studied photography in Brisbane before moving to Paris in 1990 to work in fashion and photojournalism, where she continues to reside today. Celebrated series The Birthday Party (2004) follows a group of children — Vee's daughter and her friends — dressed as monsters they created; the life-sized images feel both timeless and bizarre, pulled off by simple backdrops and the comfort...

Mark Steinmetz (b. 1961) is an Athens, Georgia-based photographer whose work captures black-and-white images of Southern Americana as seen in urban, rural and suburban landscapes. “I like to stress the poetry and ambiance of a place, while still trying to be truthful,” he has remarked, and his candid shots of everyday life reflect this statement. Examples of this sentiment are strikingly portrayed in Steinmetz's new photo series Terminus, showing the everyday moments of people passing through airports. “At the airport, people from all over the world and from all walks of life can be found in the midst of their...