Aesthetics (also spelled æsthetics or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature ofbeauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.^[1] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentimentand taste.^[2] More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, cultureand nature."^[3][4] Aesthetics is related to axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosophy of art.^[5] Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.

I like how this painting make you feel like you are really there.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men. The frank,homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.

Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens, New York. His parents were Harry and Joan Mapplethorpe and he grew up with five brothers and sisters. He studied for a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts,^[1] though he dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree.^[2] Mapplethorpe lived with his partner Patti Smith from 1967–1974, and she supported him by working in bookstores. They created art together, and even after he realized he was gay they maintained a close relationship.

Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s, his mentor and lifetime companion, art curator Sam Wagstaff gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th century American photographer. 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-focus pictorialism 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.

Cecil Beaton

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton, CBE (14 January 1904 – 18 January 1980) was an English fashion and portrait photographer, diarist, interior designer and anAcademy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre. He was named to the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame in 1970.
Beaton was born on 14 January 1904 in Hampstead the son of Ernest Walter Hardy Beaton (1867–1936), a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife Etty Sissons (1872–1962). His grandfather, Walter Hardy Beaton (1841–1904) had founded the family business of Beaton Brothers Timber Merchants and Agents, and his father followed into the business. Ernest Beaton was also an amateur actor and had met his wife, Cecil's mother, when playing the lead in a play. She was the daughter of a Cumbrian blacksmith who had come to London to visit her married sister.^[2] They had four children - in addition to Cecil there were two daughters Nancy (1909–1999) and Baba (1912–1973), and another son Reggie (1905–1933). Cecil Beaton was educated at Heath Mount School (where he was bullied by Evelyn Waugh) and St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where his artistic talent was quickly recognised. Both Cyril Connolly and Henry Longhurstreport in their autobiographies being overwhelmed by the beauty of Beaton's singing at the St Cyprian's school concerts.^[3][4] When Beaton was growing up his Nanny had a Kodak 3A Camera, a popular model which was renowned for being an ideal piece of equipment to learn on. Beaton's nanny began teaching him the basics of photography and developing film. He would often get his sisters and mother to sit for him. When he was sufficiently proficient, he would send the photos off to London society magazines, often writing under a pen name and ‘recommending’ the work of Beaton.

Bill Hoest

Bill Hoest (February 7, 1926 – November 15, 1988) was an American cartoonist best known as the creator of the gag panel series,The Lockhorns, distributed by King Features Syndicate to 500 newspapers in 23 countries, and Laugh Parade for Parade. He also created other syndicated strips and panels for King Features.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Hoest spent two years in the Navy and studied art at Cooper Union. He started his art career in 1948 as a greeting card designer with Norcross Greeting Cards, continuing in that field until 1951 when he left to become a freelancer. His cartoons soon began appearing in Collier's, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines.

Hoest entered the comic strip community during the 1960s as an assistant on Harry Haenigsen's Penny. After an injury from a 1965 traffic accident kept Haenigsen away from the drawing board, Hoest took over most of the work, although Haenigsen still supervised and signed each Penny strip. In 1970, when Hoest left to start his own strip, My Son John, for the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate, Haenigsen chose to end Penny and retired.^[2]

Hoest was one of the cartoonists featured in Think Small, a 1967 promotional book distributed as a giveaway by Volkswagen dealers. Top cartoonists of that decade drew cartoons showing Volkswagens, and these were published along with amusing automotive essays by such humorists as H. Allen Smith, Roger Price and Jean Shepherd.

David Hockney

David Hockney, CH, RA, (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire, although he also maintains a base in London. An important contributor to the Pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century.

Hockney was born in Bradford to Laura and Kenneth Hockney and educated first at Wellington Primary School. After being educated at Wellington Primary School, he then went to Bradford Grammar School,Bradford College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, where he met R. B. Kitaj. While still a student at the Royal College of Art, Hockney was featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries—alongside Peter Blake—that announced the arrival of British Pop Art. He became associated with the movement, but his early works also display expressionist elements, not dissimilar to certain works by Francis Bacon. Sometimes, as in We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), named after a poem by Walt Whitman, these works make reference to his love for men. From 1963, Hockney was represented by the influential art dealer John Kasmin. In 1963 Hockney visited New York, making contact with Andy Warhol. A later visit to California, where he lived for many years, inspired Hockney to make a series of paintings of swimming pools in Los Angeles, using the comparatively new Acrylic medium and rendered in a highly realistic style using vibrant colours. In 1967, his painting, Peter Getting Out Of Nick's Pool, won the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. He also made prints, portraits of friends, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Hockney's older sister, Margaret, who also lives in Yorkshire, is an artist of still life photos.

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz is known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painterGeorgia O'Keeffe.
Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the first son of German-Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz (1833–1909) and Hedwig Ann Werner (1845–1922).^[1]At that time his father was a lieutenant in the Union Army, but after three years of fighting and earning an officer's salary he was able to buy an exemption from future fighting.^[2] This allowed him to stay near home during his first son's childhood, and he played an active role in seeing that he was well-educated. Over the next fifteen years the Stieglitzes had five more children: Flora (1865–1890), twins Julius (1867–1937) and Leopold (1867–1956), Agnes (1869–1952) and Selma (1871–1957). Alfred Stieglitz was said to have been very jealous of the closeness of the twins, and as a result he spent much of his youth wishing for a soul mate of his own.

Edward Steiche

Edward J. Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was an American photographer,painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Steichen also contributed the logo design and a custom typeface to the magazine. In partnership with Steiglitz, Steichen opened the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", which was eventually known as 291, after its address. This gallery presented among the first American exhibitions of (among others) Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, andConstantin Brâncuşi. Steichen's photos of gowns designed by couturier Paul Poiret in the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 are regarded as the first modern fashion photographs ever published. Serving in the US Army in World War I (and the US Navy in the Second World War), he commanded significant units contributing to military photography. He was a photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair from 1923–1938, and concurrently worked for many advertising agencies including J. Walter Thompson. During these years Steichen was regarded as the best known and highest paid photographer in the world. Steichen directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. After World War II he was Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art until 1962. While at MoMA, in 1955 he curated and assembled the exhibit The Family of Man. The exhibit eventually traveled to sixty-nine countries, was seen by nine million people, and sold two and a half million copies of a companion book. In 1962, Steichen hired John Szarkowski to be his successor at the Museum of Modern Art.

Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz (born in 1938 in the Bronx, New York City) is a street photographer who began photographing in color in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of color photography as serious art. In the early 70's he taught the first color course at Cooper Union^{[citation needed]} where many of today's renowned color photographers studied with him. He made a significant change to large format color photography in 1976, and along with Stephen Shore and William Eggleston became the first group of young artists to use color exclusively.^{[citation needed]} Their work, seen and published in America and Europe, influenced the next generation's, particularly the young German artists', turn toward using color in photography. He is the author of 16 books including the seminal^{[citation needed]} book, Cape Light. Meyerowitz often uses an 8x10 large format camera to produce photographs of places and people.

Meyerowitz graduated from Ohio State University in 1959 with a degree in painting and medical illustration. Inspired by Robert Frank's bookThe Americans and by the work of Garry Winogrand, Meyerowitz took to the streets with a 35mm camera and black and white film. He also drew inspiration from Eugene Atget, whence the seeds of his most renowned work were planted. "In the pantheon of greats there is Robert Frank and there is Atget.", Meyerowitz goes on to say that "those two visions of the world captivated me early on, opened me up."^{[citation needed][original research?]}

Meyerowitz has published a photographic archive of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, and was the only photographer allowed unrestricted access to ground zero immediately following the attack.^[1] A number of these images have since been made into a book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive, published by Phaidon Press.^[2]

Meyerowitz appeared extensively in the 2006 BBC Four documentary The Genius Of Photography[1].

Meyerowitz's photograph, "New York City, 1963" is used in Taking Back Sunday's third album, Louder Now.

Edward Ruscha

Edward Joseph Ruscha IV (roo-SHAY; born December 16, 1937) is an American artist associated with the Pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking,drawing, photography, and film. Ruscha lives and works in Venice, California and in theMojave Desert.
Ruscha was born into a Roman Catholic family in Omaha, Nebraska, with a younger sister, Shelby, and a younger brother, Paul. Edward Ruscha, Sr. was an auditor for Hartford Insurance Company. Ruscha’s mother was supportive of her son’s early signs of artistic skill and interests. Young Ruscha was attracted to cartooning and would sustain this interest throughout his adolescent years. Though born in Nebraska, Ruscha lived some 15 years inOklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles in 1956 where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as the California Institute of the Arts) from 1956 through 1960. After graduation, Ruscha took a job as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts Advertising Agency in Los Angeles. He was married to Danna Knego from 1967 to 1972.