“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
–Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon is one of the most well known portrait and fashion photographers around. For over fifty years, his portraits have filled the pages of the worlds finest magazines. His stark imagery and brilliant insight into his subject’s characters made him one of the premier American portrait photographers.


Avedon was born in 1923. A high school drop out, he joined the Merchant marine’s photographic section. In 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store where he was found by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was soon producing for them as well as Vogue, Look, and many other magazines. Avedon made most of his earnings through advertising, but his real passion was portraiture and its ability to express the essence of it’s subject.
As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities to meet and photograph celebrities from a broad range of disciplines. Avedon’s gift of capturing the essence of his subjects was recognized by the public as well as the celebrities he photographed. The normally distant and inaccessible celebrities were now being shown with a sense of intimacy that neither celebrity or public were used to. Many sought out Avedon for their most public images, as his artistic style brought a sense of sophistication and authority to the portraits. It was Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at ease that helps him create true, intimate, and lasting photographs.
Avedon never lost his unique style, which was famous for it’s minimalism. His portraits were often well lit and in front of white backdrops. When printed, the images regularly contained the dark outline of the film in which the image was framed. Within the minimalism of his empty studio, Avedon’s subjects move freely, and it is this movement which brings a sense of spontaneity to the images. His portraits usually only contain a portion of the subject, the images seem intimate in their imperfections. Many photographers try to catch a moment in time or prepare a for a formal image, why Avedon is so successful is because he has found a way to combine the two.


Avedon also collaborated in portrait books. In 1959, he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most famous and important people of the century. At the same time, he created a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. He replaced the environment of his studio with the hospital, and he was able to recreate the same intimate images with non-celebrities. He also did a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.


Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years. For all of the 1970s and 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue magazine, where he would take some of the most famous portraits of the decades. In 1992 he became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, and two years later the Whitney Museum brought together fifty years of his work in the retrospective, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”. He was voted one of the ten greatest photographers in the world by Popular Photography magazine, and in 1989 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. Today, his pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous.
Avedon died on October 1st, 2004.

Labels: fashion photography, portraits, Richard Avedon

"Some people`s photography is an art. Mine is not. If they happen to be exhibited in a gallery or a museum, that`s fine. But that`s not why I do them. I`m a gun for hire." - Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton
Helmut Newton, born shortly after World War I, is the photographer whom many people believe is the father of fashion photography. He was there at the start of fashion, and his images helped shape the way of the photographers who followed him. "Newton has always been very much more than a fashion photographer - he has fundamentally changed the terms of the fashion image. Take yves saint laurent's 'le smoking'. When, in 1966, saint laurent sent out a model in a man's suit, with the aim of freeing women from the trappings of feminine, frilly dresses, he caused an almighty scandal. His aesthetic was branded 'porno chic'. To radical feminists, Helmut Newton was the antichrist - his work outraged many and they protested one of his exhibits by throwing paint on his photos.
'in my vocabulary, ART is a dirty word,' he said,but it can be assumed that the spirit of Helmut Newton's work has sympathized with the movement of the surrealists. He portraited amazonian women who live, sleep and breathe in immaculate make-up, heavy jewellery and vicious stiletto heels, gorgeous women, expensive gowns, and exotic locations to create a unique imaginative world. His pictures are showing members from the margins of society engaged in fetish driven meetings with the social elite, surrounded by sumptuous hotels and ancient midnight streets, all of them saturated with decadence, luxury, and privilege. The magic of his art is its complete elusiveness, its cunning refusal to admit the true nature of its subject matter: the failure of reality and the triumph of desire. Helmut Newton published his first book 'White Women' in 1976, which featured the most radical selections from this period.
Newton reintroduce elements of violence (or the implied threat of danger) by featuring semi-nude, highly germanic, intensely voluptuous models photographed from the rear holding pistols
discreetly hidden from their beaus behind their backs. Knives or other instruments of carnage are held in reserve by delicious femmes fatales for moments of ostensible tenderness - and blindly trusting intimacy - with unsuspecting men ripe for the kill. Newton was inspired by novels of chandler and spillane, of which he was a great admirer. Men in his photos typically appeared in servile roles, as waiters, chauffeurs or mere onlookers. The familiar backdrops of europe's grandest hotels, hollywood apartments, and riviera swimming pools are the settings for a series of mysterious dramas, whose sources are never exposed and whose conflicts are never resolved."

(All above paragraphs were taken from website: here ).

Before he was Helmut Newton, his birth name was Helmut Neustadter. Born in Berlin to an American mother and a Jewish father. Newton attended the Heinrich-von-Treitschke-Realgynnasium and the American School in Berlin. He was interested in photography at the early age of 12, when he purchased his first camera. He worked for the German photographer Yva (Elsie Neulander Simon) during 1936. However, with the continually oppressive restrictions placed on the Jews, his father lost control of the family’s button factory and they were briefly in a concentration camp. This finally compelled the family to leave Germany in 1938, where they fled to South America. Newton went onto towards China when he was given a passport at 18 and left for Singapore where he began his career as a portrait photographer. There, he interned with British authorities and was taken to Australia. After gaining Australian citizenship he changed his name to Newton.

Newton established his own studio where he worked on fashion and theatre photography with his wife, another photographer named June. He established a fantastic reputation that resulted in a feature for British Vogue about Australia. In 1957 he received a 12 month contract with Vogue and left for Britain. Before completing the contract he left for Paris where he carried on working as a fashion photographer, shooting for a variety of magazines such as French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
Newton is known for his erotic, stylized images working often with nude women with fetishistic undertones. While his work was controversial, he would always portray women with a sense of power. A heart attack in 1970 slowed Newton’s output, but his notoriety continued to increase, most notably in 1980 with his “Big Nude” series, which marked the pinnacle of his erotic-urban style, underpinned with excellent technical skills. Newton also worked in portraiture and more fantastical studies. He shot a number of pictorials for Playboy, including pictorials of Nastassia Kinski and Kristine DeBell. Original prints of the photographs from his August 1976 pictorial of DeBell, “200 Motels, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation” were sold at auctions concerning Playboy archives in 2002 for 21,075 and in 2003 for 26,290. Newton worked during the nineties photographing at the height of the supermodel era photographing models such as Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. His images were so much more than simple photographs, always including some type of narrative with his work.
“During the documentary, "Helmut By June", in which his wife records an intimate look at the man and his work, Helmut comes to the screen holding up his modern electronic camera and proclaims, "Everything is automatic! All I have to do is push the button. It's the camera that every amateur buys!". He then pauses, before pointing to his head and saying "It's all in there!". It's this idea that I think is lacking from so many photographers today. Sure it's important to know how your tools work, and how to get the best from them in any given situation, but essentially, all you need the camera to do is expose the image correctly. That's a technical thing. The creativity and art comes from pointing it in the right direction, making sure that what's in front of the camera is right. It's not about f stops and ISO's. It's about people, stories, and the ability to show people what it is that you see!”
Newton died at 83 in 2004 thanks to a car crash at his home in Southern California. He is buried in Berlin.

Labels: fashion photography, Helmut Newton

"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be." - Duane Michals


Literally the day before i had to leave to go home, instead of packing, me, Dee, and Morgan decided to do a more artsy photoshoot rather then pack. I've been wanting to experiment more with emotions. A shoot i've really wanted to do was focusing on heartbreak, a bad breakup where the individual was so crumbled they couldn't leave their house. Inspired by the song "T-shirt" by Shontelle, I made both individuals be in nothing but t-shirts, which were supposed to represent one of their ex's. Sitting in a pile of laundry because no matter what they tried on nothing was good enough, and looking alone and in despair to show their heartache. I was excited to experiment with a new type of photography and i was glad that i was able to end the semester doing something more artistic but also something that represented how i had felt the entire semester. Alone, heartbroken, and emotionally unavailable/numb. It was a very therapeutic shoot for all, and i was glad this was how i ended my semester.

Labels: depression, despair, fingerprints photography, heartbreak, lonely, shontelle, t-shirt

"Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man." - Edward Steichen


I had wanted to reshoot my "Somewhere With You Shoot" that i had previously done for my self portrait series because since i had wanted to make those more public, i didn't want to put Tyler in an awkward situation. So, i asked my friend Jesse who i knew wouldn't care and would most likely even want them/be excited that they would be public. However, instead of the sweet/memory like shoot, it became a more passionate/ Dolce and Gabana type shoot. This was a massive challenge for me. Not only was i now infront of the camera, but i actually had to act/spice things up and channel an inner alter ego that would be okay with this type of work with myself being the subject being captured for all to see and judge. However, shooting with Jesse made partaking in a shoot like this easier, comfortable, and pretty hysterical. Salina Polanco also was a very big help in this self portrait series and having a friend be there to help rather then some strange photographer also had a lot to do with helping make this a much more successful shoot. Overall, the pictures have a very Twilight like vib to them, and while they are a bit controversial, they remind me also of an axe body spray add, dolce and gabana add, and also expose very raw and intimate moments that are done with class which made them more relatable rather then raunchy. This was a struggle for me to do, and even put up, but i'm glad i did it because it really forced me to be more comfortable with myself in many ways, and not only were the photos a hit, but its a series i can actually be quite proud of because even though it was "acting" it still captured very real moments, and sharing myself like that to the world is a very very big deal for me.

Labels: axe body spray, dolce gabana, fingerprints photography, salina polanco, twilight, voyer

"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." - Mary Ellen Mark


After my show was finished at the end of the semester, i really didn't have any other specific shoots i wanted to do. So for fun, i took some photos of my friends in the studio. I also did a few self portraits with the help of Salina Polanco for my self portrait series/just to force myself to continue getting used to being in front of the camera.

Self Portraits with Andrea Gonzales
with help from Salina Polanco




Vanity Fair - Cast Movie Style
There was a cocktail going on and some friends of mine were going. They looked fantastic and we thought we'd do some fun girlfriend portraits before they went out... however then our 3 guy friends showed up and it turned into a Vanity Fair like shoot when that magazine takes movie casts photos. It was a good time and good practice for me to work with big groups of people.
Ft: Morgan Stafford, Chloe Snyder, Andrea Gonzolez, Jesse Elkins, Evan Jones, Tyler Smith

Labels: fingerprints photography, salina polanco, self portraits, studio, studio lighting, vanity fair