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Tribute to Annie Leibovitz
Hasselblad 500CM Planar 80mm Kodak Portra160
Celebrated American photographer best known for her engaging celebrity portraiture. Adept at capturing her subject’s personality and inner life, her images capture intimate or staged moments that reveal the playful and expressive aspects of her sitters, as seen in her Disney Dream Portraits (2011). “I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity,” she once said. “Everyone has a point of view. Some people call it style, but what we’re really talking about is the guts of a photograph. When you trust your point of view, that’s when you start taking pictures.” Born on October 2, 1949 in Waterbury, CT, the artist began working as a commercial photographer at Rolling Stonemagazine in the 1970s, still regularly contributes to Vanity Fair and Vogue. She has cited both Richard Avedon and Henri-Cartier Bresson as influences on her work, as well as taking pictures during her family vacations as a child. Leibovitz famously captured the last image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono before his death in 1980. In 1991, she became the first woman ever to have a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2008, Leibovitz authored and published the book Annie Leibovitz at Work, which dissects in detail how some of her most iconic images came to be. The artist’s photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Leibovitz currently lives and works in New York, NY. (artnet.com)
Tribute to Irving Penn
Was an American photographer known for both his commercial and fine art work. Using both large format and 35mm cameras, he regularly turned his lens on street debris, animal skulls, and flowers, in addition to his glamorous images of celebrities. “I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination,” he once reflected. “It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.” Born on June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, NJ, he studied art and design under Alexey Brodovitch at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia before moving to New York in 1938. In New York, Penn worked as Brodovitch’s assistant at Harper’s Bazaar magazine a painter and illustrator. Around this time, he began taking black-and-white photographs with his newly purchased Rolliflex camera. In 1943, Alexander Liberman the director of Vogue magazine hired Penn as a designer for the publication, while also encouraging him to pursue a career in fashion photography. By the early 1950s, the artist had established himself as an important photographer in the industry. Notably, Penn’s wife was the Swedish model turned artist Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn. The artist founded the Irving Penn Foundation in 2005, a non-profit which was established to promote his legacy. He died on October 7, 2009 in New York, NY at the age of 92. In 2017, his major retrospective “Irving Penn: Centennial," opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, commemorating the artist's 100th birth date. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (artnet.com)
Tribute to Bettina Rheims
Contemporary French commercial and fine art photographer known for her erotic depictions of women. Frank portrayal of the nude body has remained the focus of her practice, which bears the influence of Helmut Newton. Among her best-known works is the series Chambre Close (1990–1992), featuring color photographs of women in nude in unconventional poses, which culminated in the publication of a photobook in 1992. Born on December 18, 1952 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the former journalist, gallerist, and model was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1981. It was her portraits of acrobats, striptease performers, and androgynous youths as seen in her series Modern Lovers that first garnered her critical acclaim. Rheims has gone one to photograph fashion models and celebrities for magazines and newspapers such as Elle, L’Officiel, and Marie Claire, as well as ad campaigns for Chanel and Lancôme. Rheims won the Grand Prix de la Photographie de la ville de Paris in 1994 and the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2002 for her work. She currently lives and works in Paris, France. Rheims’s works are held in the collections of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum for Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. (artnet.com)
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