Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh, CC (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002) was a Canadian photographer ofArmenian heritage, and one of the most famous and accomplished portrait photographers of all time.
Yousuf or Josuf (his given Armenian name was Hovsep) Karsh was born in Mardin, a city in the eastern Ottoman Empire (presentTurkey). He grew up during the Armenian Genocide where he wrote, "I saw relatives massacred; my sister died of starvation as we were driven from village to village."At the age of 14, he fled with his family to Syria to escape persecution. Two years later, his parents sent Yousuf to live with his uncle George Nakash, a photographer in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Karsh briefly attended school there and assisted in his uncle’s studio. Nakash saw great potential in his nephew and in 1928 arranged for Karsh to apprentice with portrait photographer John Garo in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. His brother, Malak Karsh, was also a photographer famous for the image of logs floating down the river on the Canadian one dollar bill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yousuf_Karsh 11/30/10

Vocab

Vandyke photography- alternative photograph processing.The Van Dyke print is developed in plain running water, which completes the chemical changes initiated by exposure to UV light. It is then fixed in a quite dilute (3-5%) solution of standard print fixer for a short time to remove any insoluble silver compounds which might darken with continued exposure to light. Finally, it is rigorously rinsed, hypo-cleared, and washed to remove all traces of the hypo fixer.

Kalli Print-Kallitype printing follows similar procedures and uses many of the same chemicals as Platinum and Palladium Printing. Kallitype is a great process for students and beginners who want to practice their handcoating and printing techniques before moving up to Platinum or Palladium printing.

Contains:
25 ml - Silver Nitrate 10% Solution
25 ml - Ferric Oxalate 20% Solution
25 ml - Ammonium Dichromate contrast booster
250 g - EDTA Clearing Agent
250 g - Sodium Thiosulfate fixer
1 Quart - Black tone developer
Droppers For Bottles
Instructions

Cyanotypes- is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints. Two chemicals are used in the process:

• Ammonium iron(III) citrate
• Potassium ferricyanide.

Thomas Petillo

Nashville, Tennessee-based photographer Thomas Petillo is perhaps best known for his strikingly intimate portraits of great musicians (Robert Plant, Ben Folds, John Prine, Kid Rock and Porter Wagoner, to name only a few). Thomas has spent thirteen years honing the skills necessary to produce these beautiful images for record labels, magazines, and ad agencies. These portraits have come to define his style. But a very different Petillo has emerged in the last few years as the result of a series of commissions by Hammock, the ambient duo, who asked him to create images for their recordings. No matter his subject, Petillo's images are characterized by a delicate balance of stark realism and magical wonder, as if he stands with one foot in the spirit and the other in the flesh. This rare talent has given his work a singular imprint and has earned for him a distinguished place among contemporary photographers.
http://www.therymergallery.com/artists/?id=61 11/1/10

Sally Martin

Sally Erana Martin (born May 14, 1985 in Wellington, New Zealand) is an actress best known for her role as Tori Hanson/the Blue Wind Ninja Ranger, who has the Power of Water on the television series Power Rangers: Ninja Storm. Martin became very famous after doing the Power Rangers series.

Besides her role in Power Rangers: Ninja Storm, she has also worked in several other shows such as The Tribe and The Strip and in the TV movie Murder in Greenwich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Martin 11/1/10

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (diːˈæn ˈɑrbəs,^[2] March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971^[3]) was an Americanphotographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) or else of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal."^[4] A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid... that she would be known simply as 'the photographer of freaks'";^[5]however, that term has been used repeatedly to describe her.^[6][7][8]

In 1972, a year after she committed suicide, Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale.^[9] Millions of people viewed traveling exhibitions of her work in 1972-1979.^[3][10] In 2003-2006, Arbus and her work were the subjects of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations.^[11] In 2006, the motion picture Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus, presented a fictional version of her life story.^[12]

Although some of Arbus's photographs have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, Arbus's work has provoked controversy; for example, Norman Mailer was quoted in 1971 as saying "Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus 11/1/10

Disfarmer

Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959) was an American photographer whose portraits of everyday people in rural Arkansas gave them a sense of dignity.

Born Mike Meyers, he changed his surname to "Disfarmer" to break with his family's agrarian roots, the first move in a maverick career that embraced both obscurity and a rigorous aesthetic.^{[citation needed]} Disfarmer maintained a portrait studio in his hometown of Heber Springs, Arkansas, and photographed members of the local community for small fees.^{[citation needed]} But his "penny portraits" were far more than mere keepsake photographs. Employing a stark realism and often lengthy, unnervingly mute sitting sessions, Disfamer produced a consistent stream of portraits that strip his subjects into an uncanny intimacy.^{[citation needed]} His photographs capture the essence of a particular community in a particular time with piercing solemnity and a touching simplicity. His reclusive lifestyle has left many details of his life obscure or uncertain.

A large cache of negatives shot by Disfarmer were found in the 1970s in Heber Springs by Peter Miller who spent a year on a bicentennial grant cleaning, preserving and catalogueing the negatives. Subsequently, two exhibitions of Disfarmer's own prints were held.^[1]

In 2008, a picture of Disfarmer was used on the 80th Academy Awards telecast as the alleged portrait of Roderick Jaynes, the film editing pseudonym of the Coen brothers, who was nominated at that ceremony for editing the Coens' film No Country for Old Men.^[2]Disfarmer's photo was supplied to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by the Coens after Jaynes' nomination.^[3]

He was the subject of a puppet-theater production in New York in 2009.^[1]

His gravesite has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Disfarmer 11/1/10

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th century Americanphotographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…"^[1] and "one of the masters of 20th century photography."^[2]

Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft-focuspictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.

Over the course of his forty-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography"^[3] because of his focus on the people and places of the American West.

In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.

In 1947 Weston was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Weston 11/1/10