Bill Brandt also known as Hermann Wilhelm Brandt was born on May 2nd, 1904 and passed away on  December  20, 1983. He was a British photographer as well as a photojournalist. He was orignally born in German but later moved to England, where he received recognition for his images of the British society under the magazine brands such as Lilliput and Picture Post, and eventually leading to his distorted nudes, along with portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is famously portrayed to be at the top of the list of important British photographers in the 20th century.

http://www.billbrandt.com/bill-brandt-archive-print-shop/sp04-grand-union-canal-paddington-c1938

One of this pieces was the “Grand Union Canal, Paddington c1938” which shows a waterway, that was engineered by William Jessop and James Barnes, it established a link of London, via Brentford and the Thames, with the canals of the Midlands. This piece is actually quite beautiful of a black and white photograph which has a sense of repetition and perfect flow of the water and buildings creating a sense of depth of perspective. Its really composed shot.

Man Ray (1890–1976) was a innovator of the Dada crusade in the United States and France and a vital leading role of Surrealism. Man Ray found motivation at the Armory show of 1913, which introduced the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. Ray moved to Paris in 1921. He became to be well-known for his photographs of his creative and literary allies. He also established a flourishing career as a fashion photojournalist, by taking pictures for such publications as Vogue. His testing with photography comprised of experiencing how to create “camera-less” pictures, which he named Rayographs. These photographs were prepared by employing and influencing objects on pieces of photosensitive paper.

Ray’s prominent works from the 1924’s “Le Violon d’Ingres.”

Man Ray remained a fan of the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and completed a successions of pictures, motivated by Ingres’s languorous nudes, of the model Kiki in a turban. Placing the f-holes of a stringed instrument on the photographic print and then re-photographing the print, Man Ray transformed what was initially a standard nude. He also decided to add the name Le Violon d’Ingres, a French idiom that means “hobby.” The alteration of Kiki’s physique into a harmonious instrument with the simple accumulation of a little brushstrokes makes this a hilarious image, but then again her armless form is also alarming to consider. The photograph upholds a tautness among objectification and appreciation of the female body. I would interpret the photo as the women body can be great as to listening to music.

Arbitrating after Ray’s presence of this image in other photographic arrangements, he required to have considered Tears one of his most triumphant photographs. A cropped version of it with a single eye also appears as the first plate in a 1934 book of his photographs. The woman’s lamenting rising glimpse and mascara-encrusted lashes seem envisioned to raise curiosity at the source of her suffering. The face, however, belongs not to a actual female but to a fashion mannequin who cries tears of sparkling, rotund glass drops; the result is to aestheticize the feeling her tears would usually express. Man Ray finished this photograph in Paris about the time of his collapsing with his partner Lee Miller, and the woman’s false tears may narrate to that occasion in the artist’s life.

Sowon Jung

Elliott Erwitt was born in 1928 in the beautiful city of France, Paris. When he was ten in 1939, his family originally from Russia shifted to the United States. There, from the New School for Social Sciences and Los Angeles City College, Erwitt learned photography and filmmaking until 1950. During the same decade, Erwitt worked as an assistant photographer.Erwitt was hired by Stryker who used to be the Director of the department of photography at Farm Security Administration, to do a project for Standard Oil Company. Once done, Erwitt started a freelance career in photography and worked for Life, Look, Holiday, and Coiller’s. In 1953, Elliott Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and this gave him a chance to do international projects.

Elliott Erwitt, Santa Monica, California (1955)

This is one of well-known photographs among Elliott Erwitt’s famous works. According to Elliott Erwitt’s biography, he describes taking photos as “just composing all the parts in a rectangle” I personally think that this photo is very harmonious that shows strong impact by playing composition within the rectangle frame. As you can see, the objects in this photo is not special and unique at all, but somehow it is so beautiful because the photographer tried to find something interesting in the ordinary. Putting the object (the couple) in the lower side of rectangle is well composed and the blurry images of background also helps to focus well. Moreover, this photo is so impressive because audiences can feel the same emotion through the woman’s smile which implies what the photographer might want to say.  The photographer might want to share his thought that life is not always special as everyone expects but, life can be happy in our ordinary daily moments.

Holding a small camera and shooting photos on streets, Andre Kertesz is considered one of “the seminal figures of photojournalism” (Wiki). Kertesz was born in Hungary in 1894 (died in 1985). He got his first camera when he was 18. After finishing his Hungarian period of life, he immigrated to French in 1925. Since that, Kertesz started to shine on the world stage. Even though his life got a low point when he moved to the United Sates, he published a book named “Sixty Years of Photography, 1912-1972.” Kertesz’s special photograph style also strongly influents Henri Cartier-Bresson, the master of candid photography.

The first photograph of Kertesz is “The Circus.” It was shoot in 1920. At that time, Kertesz was still at Hungary and he liked to photograph the Hungarian peasants around him. Here we can see, there is a couple peeking at concealed circus performers through cracks in a wooden fence, and the man appears to have only one leg. This is Kertesz’s early work and it’s easy to see his clarity of style. This couple is centered and all the fence is geometric patterning in this photo. As Kertesz recorded, “I photographed real life-not the way it was, but the way I felt it. This is the most important thing: not analyzing, but feeling” (Blog). Here we can see, Kertesz was trying to make connection between his emotion and his subjects by using his special geometric photograph style. For me, I think the angel of shooting photos can arouse audience’s curiosity about what this couple is peeking there.

 The Circus, Budapest, 1920

Another photography of Kertesz is “The Lost Cloud” which was shoot in New York. As described, “One afternoon he observed a solitary white cloud lost in a huge blue sky, dwarfed by the monolithic presence of the Rockefeller Center” (Getty). Kertesz said this cloud represented himself. Here we can directly feel his emotion through looking at this photography. Kertesz endowed this cloud with a personal, emotional dimension. That exactly conformed to Kertesz’s photography style. The white space conflicts to the geometric building shape, which gives audience a feeling of Kertesz himself. In my opinion, this photo is fresh and vivid while it represents Kertesz’s real life situation. I think no matter what kind of photography skills we focus on, as long as we shoot objects by our hearts and feel them, we will experience the quintessential spirit of Andre Kertesz.

 The Lost Cloud, New York, 1937