Eugene Atget

Eugene is not a very well-know French man. A few documented facts and a handful of recollections and legends provide a scant outline of the man. He was born in Lilbourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857 and worked as a sailor during his youth. From the sea he turned to the stage, although he didn’t have much success. At the age of forty he quit acting and took up some painting tentatively, which somehow lead him to photography and bounded on his new journey, his true life’s work.
Atget assigned himself an alluring and provoking subject, the city of Paris. Pairs, the city of art and bridges over the Seine, of boulevards and cafes, of narrow, crooked streets and gray plane trees in the beautiful Luxembourg gardens.
To Atget, Paris was not a dream but an actuality a fact of hard material expressions, of strange contrasts and contradictions.
In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique or toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, and details.

He worked quietly at his calling. Eugene wasn’t too progressive but he was patient with techniques that were obsolescent when he adopted them.
He was little given to experiment in the conventional sense, and less to theorizing. I suppose he had developed a true vision for photography. His work is unique on two different levels. Eugene was the maker of visual catalogue of fruits in French culture. Atget set himself the task of understanding and interpreting in visual terms a complex, ancient, and living tradition. The pictures that he made in the service of this are deceptively seductively reticent, poised, simple, dense, wholly with experience, mysterious, and true.

Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born in Aimorés in 1944. He was the 6th child, and only boy in a family consisting of eight children. He stufied the economics of Brazil (1964-67) and had earned his M.A. in economics in 1968 from the University of São Paulo and Vanderbilt University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Paris in 1971 and worked as a economist for the International Coffee Organization until 1973.

He discovered his love for photography when he borrowed his wife Lélia's camera on a trip to Africa and decided to switch to photography in 1973. He then joined the Sygma photo agency in 1974 to 1975 followed by the Gamma agency in 1975 until 1979. He was elected to membership in the international cooperative, Magnum Photos, and remained until 1994. He covered several news events and also started more personal documentary projects.





For seven years he wandered through Latin America. He walked to small mountain villages to produce the images for his exhibition, and eventually his book, Other Americas (1986), which was an in-depth examination of poorer parts of the world and how their cultures functioned. He did several documentary projects such as Workers (1993), After Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), and in 2000 Salgodo published Migrations of The Children.




Sabastiao Salgado is a world-renowned photographer, known to be part of the tradition of “concerned photography,” and has been awarded several major photographic prizes and awards recognizing his accomplishments from around the world. In 1994 he founded his own press agency, Amazonas Images, which is a representation of him and much of his work. He now lives in Paris with his two sons, and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who is also his collaborator and has designed most of his books.



My Sources:

http://web.utah.edu/unews/releases/03/sep/salgado.html

http://www.terra.com.br/sebastiaosalgado/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebasti%C3%A3o_Salgado



Two links to pictures:


http://www.fao.org/common/photos/05_04_salgado_photos/salgado1.jpg

http://www.sergiosakall.com.br/montagem/sebastiao-salgado.jpg

August Sanders, the man, the photos.

August Sander

August Sander was born on November 17, 1876 to a carpenter in the mining industry in Germany. He began his Photography career as a photographer’s assistant who was also with the mining company. After becoming very interested in the subject he borrowed enough money from his uncle to set up his own his own darkroom and buy the proper equipment. He spent some time doing his photography and when he served in the German military from 1897 to 1899 he served as a photographer’s assistant. After his time in the military he spent some time traveling across Germany.

In 1901, Sander settled down in the town of Graz and started working in a photographer’s studio. After a few years he became the sole proprietor of the studio. But left in 1910 to set up his new studio in Cologne. In 1927, Sander and writer Ludwig Marthar went on a trip to travel through Sardinia for three months taking over 500 photos on his way.

During the NAZI rule of Germany, August found that his work and form of expression were severely limited due to the strict control of the government. Sander’s son Erich was arrested during this time for being a member of the left wing Socialist Worker’s Party in Germany. He died in prison in 1944 shortly before the end of his sentence. At the outbreak of the Second World War Sander moved to a rural region of the country, but his studio was destroyed anyway by an allied bombing raid in 1944.

August Sander is most well known for his portraits of the German people during the reign of the Weimar Republic. He used a method of showing the divided classes of society in his pictures.