Annie Leibovitz: An American Portrait Photographer

She found that she enjoyed painting natural and abstract ideas with charcoal, clay, and watercolour paints. While she was in school, she found that the art she created was far too unfulfilling and stopped making art for a few years. Once she started painting again, she became a commercial artist in Chicago until she moved to Texas to teach art classes. She continued to create art, experimenting with mixing natural and abstract ideas together, until an old classmate from college showed her art to a friend in New York, Alfred Stieglitz, whom owned an art gallery called “291”. He displayed her art in his gallery in 1916 without her knowledge. He offered to fund her to remain studying art if she continued to paint. She suffered from Macular Degeneration and lost her eyesight, painting her last unassisted oil painting in 1972. She wrote her own illustrated autobiography in 1976, that became a bestseller and received the Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford the following year. She completely lost her sight in 1977 and continued to make art despite this disability through her assistants. Even after she died, her art still grew in popularity, and was considered the foremother of feminist

The stock market crash made her studio photography irrelevant since majority of the population could not afford to have their pictures taken. During this period, she became aware of all the unemployed people around her. It was during the Great Depression where her greatest pieces of works were developed. During the first years of the Depression, fourteen million people were jobless. There was a rich woman known as the

A variety of her works in the late 1970’s were called “Untitled Film Stills.” These were portraits of Sherman playing “stereotypical woman roles” in the 1960’s and 1950’s. Although, these were not self-portraits,

Alfred Eisenstaedt was the photographer present who captured the famous Life magazine photo that was used to demonstrate the celebration of that day. The famous photograph consisted of an American sailor kissing a woman in a white dress in Times Square. There were many mysteries on who were the people pictured, many men had claimed to be the sailor but only the nurse’s identity was confirmed. For the longest time, people had thought that Edith Shain was the woman in the picture, but she was the only one who came forward about it, later one two other women contacted Life magazine and claimed to be the nurse. The two women were Greta Friedman and Barbara Sokol, it was then later determined that Greta Friedman was the woman because the other two had an insufficient height of just under five feet and it was not comparable with the height of any of the men claiming to be the

Alex Kotlowitz met Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers in 1985 while working as a journalist. He was interviewing them for a photo essay in Chicago magazine on children living in poverty. The violence that occurred every day where the brothers lived in Governor Henry Horner Homes, or Horner, disturbed Kotlowitz. Lafeyette and Pharoah are 12 and 9 years old at the start of the book but have experienced more than many kids their age. The boys did not seem sure of what life held for them. Lafeyette told Kotlowitz, “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver,” Lafeyette was not sure that he would grow up at just 10 years old (x). Kotlowitz wanted to show what it is like for children growing up in urban poverty after seeing the brothers’

Undergoing one of the greatest economical transitions in United States history, the Gilded Age is a period heralded with rapid industry, innovation, and transformation that ushered the modernization of a rapidly growing nation. Reveling in unprecedented financial growth, unfortunately also gave way to many errors that scar the social ethos. With the dominion of capitalism and corporations over the common man, monopolization, corruption, and conspicuous consumption led to divisions in class, race, and labor among 19th century Americans— as such, the prevailing issues of the Gilded Age ultimately sparked a desire for social reform (Roark 530). At the forefront of exposing prevalent issues like poverty and child labor, social reformers utilized

Georgia collaborated with many other artists, journalists, and photographers to generate new ideas and inspire each other’s creations (“About Georgia O’Keeffe,” 2017). She

Alice Neel is known to be one of the greatest American portraitists back in the

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

For my chosen photographer, I have based my project for ‘In the style’ on Berenice Abbott’s. Abbott work was mainly based in the 1930’s of the urban designs of America, she was best known for her black and white photography as well as her documentation of New York City. She had a great approach to photography in a variety of ways, through her own style of work and through her introduction of other artists including Eugene Atget’s, for his unique photographic techniques. Abbott’s work has not always been based on photography as she focused on Journalism, but soon became interested in theatre and sculpture. She began her career in photography in 1923 as an apprentice to Man Ray. In 1925, she set up her own photography studio in Paris and made several well-known portraits of artists and writers who were popular in this time. Berenice returned to New York City in the time of the Wall Street Crash, which was the largest stock market crash in American history in

“The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding, but you forget, you are just looking so much.”-Annie Leibovitz. American portrait photographer Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1970 she applied for a job at Rolling Stone magazine, she was accepted and she became a staff photographer and within a span of 2 years she became the chief photographer of Rolling Stone magazine. In 1983 Annie started working for the great Vanity Fair magazine. From then on, her career was on a rollercoaster that only goes up. Later on, she worked on numerous supplementary projects that include Walt Disney Parks and Resorts "Year of a Million Dreams" campaign, Miley Cyrus’s Vanity Fair topless photo shoot, and the Rolling Stones Tour of the Americas '75. Leibovitz is not a great photographer; she is a great storyteller, which makes her a great photographer.

Dorothea Lange put some the photographs she took in to her books. Her book Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, published in 1996,explores the world of the rural Irish families. It shows there

No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and

Margaret Bourke-White, world-renowned photographer, was a true icon to the world because of her unusual early life and education, her striking industrial photography career, powerful human-interest photography, and her heroic battle with a crippling disease in her final years. Margaret Bourke-White’s younger years took a unique and interesting route. On June 14, 1904 (Browne 38), Joseph and Minnie White (Goldberg 9) brought Margaret Bourke White (Welch 27) into the world in the Bronx, New York (Oden 2). Margaret's was meant to be birthed on June 13, but after discovering that Joseph and Minnie’s anniversary was the next day, the doctor prolonged Minnie’s labor (Goldberg 7). Margaret had two siblings (Oden 2), Ruth and Roger (Welch 8). At a

The name "Photography" comes from the Greek words for light and writing. Sir John Herschel, was the first to use the term photography in 1839, when he managed to fix images using hyposulphite of soda. He described photography as "The application of the chemical rays to the purpose of pictorial representation". Herschel also coined the terms "negative", "positive" and "snapshot".