Carly Beyer- Style
Ruth Orkin
Ruth Orkin is an American photographer and filmmaker with a
long history of photography. At the age of 10, she received her first camera, a
39 cent Univex and began by photographing her friends and teachers at school.
Then at age of 17 she took a monumental bicycle trip across the United States
from Los Angeles to New York City and photographed along the way. As a
teenager, Orkin became fascinated by the environment of the movies, and she
began to photograph her encounters with stars and many other subjects. Orkin's
pictures, which were most often taken on assignment, show a close attention to
expression and gesture that gives them a feeling of warmth and charm. Orkin moved to New York in 1943, where she
worked as a nightclub photographer and shot baby pictures by day to buy her
first professional camera. Her photograph American Girl in Italy (1951),
which captured a woman walking down a street in Italy and being stared at by a
group of men, became an iconic image of the street photography genre and she
soon became known for her explorations of contemporary urban life. Her tenacity
when following a subject often resulted in extremely intimate images, as in her
1949 photograph of Julie Harris, Carson McCullers and Ethel Waters slumped on a
couch after the opening night of Miss McCullers's play ''The Member of the
Wedding.'' Orkin became know for photographing celebrities and developed a
reputation as being a highly sought-after freelance photographer.
American Girl in Italy (1951) Ruth Orkin
Henry Wessel
Wessel came to photography almost accidentally during his
years at Pennsylvania State University, then began photographing
seriously in 1967, inspired by the work of Wright Morris, Robert Frank, and
Garry Winogrand. In the 1970s, Wessel became part of a generation of artists
who challenged and expanded the categories of landscape and documentary
photography. These artists changed the traditional views of pristine nature in
favor of straightforward and personal displays of the built environment.
Wessel’s most recent style was focused on the light, architecture, and social
landscape of Northern and Southern California. Wessel's deadpan pictures share
the spontaneous nature and authenticity of snapshots, combining surprising
frankness with his own humor. His low-key style matches the modest nature of
his subject matter, he has found a certain richness in the aesthetics of the
everyday, turning the least monumental of subjects into a kind of personal
poetry. All of Wessel’s photographs are shot with a Leica 35 mm camera with a
28 mm wide-angle lens and Kodak Tri-X film and are typically portrayed in black and white.
Pismo Beach California (1974) Henry Wessel
Barbara Ess
Barbara Ess is famous for her unique use of the pinhole
camera, and her effort to "photograph what cannot be photographed."
Her haunting images describe a mysterious world of seemingly ordinary surfaces
where everyday objects are shown erratically. Ess shows a conscious effort to
explore what she calls "ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people,
between the self and the not self, between in here and out there." Using a
simple cardboard camera with no lens and a minute aperture, Ess creates
unsettling, very evocative photographs. Barbara Ess was born in Brooklyn and
received a BA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1969
and attended the London School of Film Technique in London in 1971. She has been
exhibited widely throughout the world and her works belong to numerous collections.
Barbara Ess lives and works in New York. Because of the limited available light
and short depth of field, her photos are always dark and misty, often
silhouetted around the sides. Everything is slightly out of focus except for
the very center of the subject. The photographs are made on black-and-white
negatives and printed on colored papers; whose tones become nuanced by the
minimal light afforded by the camera. Ess focuses less on technique rather than
on the unique subject matter, such as a dog’s front legs. The extremely limited
field of vision creates a dreamlike print in which she explores the ambiguous
perceptual boundaries in typically intimate compositions.
Untitled (1986) Barbara Ess
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