Reflection upon the trip

I think this photography field trip was very influential. We got a glimpse on every piece photography since its birth. Learning about the famous photographers and their background. Including their ways of creating their art in various fashions/methods that technology could offer at the time. Years going back as the late 1800's to now. I learned that, photography, is ultimately a form of art.

Notable Photographer: Annie Leibovitz

Photographer Annie Leibovitz was born October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1970 she took a job at Rolling Stone magazine. In 1983 she began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair. During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. From the 1990s to the present, she has been publishing and exhibiting her work. She was one of the six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. Known for her ability to make her sitters become physically involved in her work, one of Leibovitz’s most famous portraits is of the late artist Keith Haring, who painted himself like one of his canvases for the photo. She is considered one of America’s best portrait photographers.

Notable Photographer: Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon was best known for his work in the fashion world and for his minimalist portraits. He worked first as a photographer for the Merchant Marines, taking identification photos. He then moved to fashion, shooting for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, demanding that his models convey emotion and movement, a departure from the norm of motionless fashion photography. Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon's Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents' clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father's store. One of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Richard Avedon expanded the genre of photography with his surreal and provocative fashion photography as well as portraits that bared the souls of some of the most important and opaque figures in the world. Richard Avedon passed away on October 1, 2004, while on assignment for The New Yorker in San Antonio, Texas. He was 81 years old.

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. He developed modern photography in America in the early years of the twentieth century, publishing the periodical Camera Work and forming the exhibition society, the Photo-Secession. Apart from photography he was well famous for running art galleries in New York City.

Paul Strand

 Paul Strand, born October 16, 1890-March 31, 1976. Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. Although he was never a member of the Communist party Strand was politically of the left, many of his collaborators were either Party members or were prominent socialist writers and activists. Many of his friends were also Communists or were suspected of being so. Strand was also closely involved with Frontier Films, one of more than twenty organizations that were branded as ‘subversive’ and ‘un-American’ by the US Attorney General. His sympathies were with the ordinary working man and woman and much of his photography was concerned with the dignity and importance of labour and the "working class". He saw himself as a documentary photographer who's role was to record and reveal the truth about social injustice and the position of the common man. He insisted that his books should be printed in Leipzig, East Germany, even if this meant that they were initially prohibited from the American market on account of their Communist provenance. De-classified intelligence files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and now lodged at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, reveal that Strand’s movements around Europe were closely monitored by the security services.

Gordon Parks

 Parks began to explore subjects beyond portraits and fashion photographs in Chicago. He became interested in the low-income black neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side. In 1941, Parks won a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration for his images of the inner city.
 Parks created some of his most enduring photographs during this fellowship, including "American Gothic, Washington, D.C.," picturing a member of the FSA cleaning crew in front of an American flag.
 He also became a freelance photographer for Vogue. Parks worked for Vogue for a number of years, developing a distinctive style that emphasized the look of models and garments in motion, rather than in static poses. And also working as a documentary photographer during the civil rights movement.

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was a photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary photography.During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.