Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams 1902-1984
By far one of my favourite film photographers ever. I am in total awe of his work. Adam’s legacy includes helping to elevate photography to an art comparable with painting and music, and equally capable of expressing emotion and beauty. He told his students, “It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.”
Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark 1940-2015
Words cannot explain the emotion that Mary Ellen Mark manages to capture in her work. I love every single piece I have seen from her and undoubtedly along with Ansel Adams one of the most famous film photographers of all time. She published 18 books of photographs; contributed to publications including Life, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, New York Times, and Vanity Fair. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide. Mark was transparent with the subjects of her photography about her intent to use what she saw in the world for her art, about which she has said “I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908-2004
www.henricartierbresson.org/en
Cartier-Bresson spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals. He traveled without bounds, documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th century — the Spanish civil war, the liberation of Paris in 1944, the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, the fall of the Kuomintang in China to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, and the deserts of Egypt. And along the way he paused to document portraits of Camus, Picasso, Colette, Matisse, Pound and Giacometti. But many of his most renowned photographs, such as Behind the Gare St. Lazare, are of seemingly unimportant moments of ordinary daily life.
