Berenice Abbott was born in Springford, Ohio, in 1898. After graduating from Ohio State University she moved to New York to study journalism, but eventually decided on sculpture and painting.
In 1921 she moved to Paris to study with sculptor Emile Bourdelle. Abbot also worked with the surrealist photographer, Man Ray (1923-25), before opening her own studio in Paris. She photographed the leading artists in France and had her first exhibition at the Au Sacre du Printemps Gallery in 1926.
Abbott returned to the United States in 1929 and embarked on a project to photograph New York. In 1935 she managed to obtain funding for this venture from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its Federal Art Project.
In 1936 Abbott joined with Paul Strand to establish the Photo League. Its initial purpose was to provide the radical press with photographs of trade union activities and political protests. Later the group decided to organize local projects where members concentrated on photographing working class communities.
Abbott's photographs of New York appeared in the exhibition, Changing New York, at the Museum of the City in 1937. A book, Changing New York, was published in 1939. She is also published a Guide to Better Photography (1941). In the late 1950s Abbott began to take photographs that illustrated the laws of physics. Berenice Abbott died in Monson, Maine, in 1991.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAPabbott.htm

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Pierre Boucher is a photographer who has contributed much to give the picture its place in modern art.He studied at the School of Applied Arts before working in the 1930s the magazine Arts and Crafts Graphics . Its proximity to the studios advertising and knowledge of modern graphics technology will be instrumental in her artistic approach. In 1934 , he created with René Zuber Agency Alliance-Photo . Within the agency, it imposes the first code of ethics and compliance photographer signature photographers upon publication in the media. His frequent trips to Spain , Egypt , Morocco , Monaco , Russia , Peru , Bolivia , Brazil or the United States , it will bring a large collection of photographs, some of which give rise to exposures.
But it's time to mark especially have contributed significantly to bringing photography into modernity, as artistic material in full, using mechanical techniques for imaging diverted. With Pierre Boucher, the photographer out of the darkroom to learn about other professions. Actor current photo of the New Vision or New Objectivity , Pierre Boucher explores various aspects of avant-garde photography. He must nudes surrealist inspired by Man Ray , the frames , the photo collages , of solarizations and overprints . For this post tireless innovator cliché, all techniques are good to explore.
Her artistic approach also comes on commissioned work as posters, pictures, documentaries, industrial reports and illustrations for publishing, such as the famous French ski Method of Emile Allais . He had to sport a special attraction for which he expresses himself in these terms: "Today I hunt for images. Must be satisfied with a quick glance, captures motion in flight, capturing life in that it offers more moving, more elusive.
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boucher_(photographe)

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Margaret Bourke-White, original name Margaret White (born June 14, 1904, New York, New York, U.S.—died August 27, 1971, Stamford, Conn.), American photographer known for her contributions to photojournalism.

Margaret White was the daughter of an engineer-designer in the printing industry. She attended Columbia University (1922–23), the University of Michigan (1923–25), Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), and Cornell University (A.B., 1927). During this period she took up photography, first as a hobby and then, after leaving Cornell and moving to New York City, on a professional freelance basis. She combined her own last name with her mother’s maiden name (Bourke) to create her hyphenated professional name. Beginning her career in 1927 as an industrial and architectural photographer, she soon gained a reputation for originality, and in 1929 the publisher Henry Luce hired her for his new Fortune magazine. In 1930 Fortune sent Bourke-White to photograph the Krupp Iron Works in Germany, and she continued on her own to photograph the First Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union. She became one of the first four staff photographers for Life magazine when it began publication in 1936, and her series of photographs of Fort Peck Dam was featured on the cover and as part of the feature story of the first issue.

Throughout the 1930s Bourke-White went on assignments to create photo-essays in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Dust Bowl in the American Midwest. These experiences allowed her to refine the dramatic style she had used in industrial and architectural subjects. These projects also introduced people and social issues as subject matter into her oeuvre, and she developed a compassionate, humanitarian approach to such photos. In 1935 Bourke-White met the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, to whom she was married from 1939 to 1942. The couple collaborated on three illustrated books: You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), about Southern sharecroppers; North of the Danube (1939), about life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi takeover; and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941), about the industrialization of the United States.

Bourke-White covered World War II for Life and was the first woman photographer attached to the U.S. armed forces. While crossing the Atlantic to North Africa her transport ship was torpedoed and sunk, but Bourke-White survived to cover the bitter daily struggle of the Allied infantrymen in the Italian campaign. She then covered the siege of Moscow and, toward the end of the war, she crossed the Rhine River into Germany with General George Patton’s Third Army troops. Her photographs of the emaciated inmates of concentration camps and of the corpses in gas chambers stunned the world.

After World War II, Bourke-White traveled to India to photograph Mahatma Gandhi and record the mass migration caused by the division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. During the Korean War she worked as a war correspondent and traveled with South Korean troops.

Stricken with Parkinson disease in 1952, Bourke-White continued to photograph and write. She retired from Life magazine in 1969.
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/75883/Margaret-Bourke-...

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Gyula (Jules) Halász (the Western order of his name) was born in Brassó, Transsylvania, Kingdom of Hungary (since 1920 Brașov, Romania), to an Armenian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up speaking Hungarian.[2] When he was three, his family lived in Paris for a year, while his father, a professor of French literature, taught at the Sorbonne.
As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzomuvészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War. Brassaï's photographs brought him international fame. In 1948, he had a one-man show in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which traveled to the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.[6] MOMA exhibited more of Brassai's works in 1953, 1956, and 1968.[7] He was presented at the Rencontres d'Arles festival (France) in 1970 (screening at the Théâtre Antique, "Brassaï" by Jean-Marie Drot), in 1972 (screening "Brassaï si, Vominino" by René Burri), and in 1974 (as guest of honour).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassa%C3%AF

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Born February 4, 1902, in Mexico City, Mexico; died of natural causes, October 19, 2002, in Mexico City, Mexico. Photographer. Manuel Alvarez Bravo's photographs represented the height of Mexican photography during the 1930s and '40s. One of the leading surrealist artists on the North American continent, his work was also praised for its realism because of its intense focus on the everyday lives of Mexico's diverse population.

The son of a high school teacher, Alvarez Bravo left school by the age of 13 and began work in a government office. For a short time, he studied music and painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts. Working as a clerk to support himself, Alvarez Bravo continued to show an interest in art. He learned basic photography from a family friend who had given him a camera. Eventually he bought his own camera and was lucky enough to receive training from some of Europe's finest photographers.

Alvarez Bravo learned European photographic techniques from Hugo Brehme, whom Alvarez Bravo met when he was 21. Brehme also introduced Alvarez Bravo to Wilhelm Kahlo, who, like Brehme, was another German–born photographer making his home in Mexico. Kahlo was the father of the famous painter Frida Kahlo who—along with muralist Diego Rivera—strongly influenced Mexican art during the early post–Revolutionary years.

Alvarez Bravo continued to meet other photographers who had a great influence on him. In particular, the Italian photographer Tina Modotti bolstered Alvarez Bravo's career. As principal photographer for Mexican Folkways, she helped get his work published in the magazine. Mexican Folkways focused on Mexican popular art and customs as well as showcasing the muralists of the time. When Modotti was deported from Mexico in 1930 for her political beliefs, Alvarez Bravo took over her duties.

Alvarez Bravo began exhibiting his works in the mid–1920s. In 1926, he won an award for regional photography at an exhibition. An introduction to American photographer Edward Weston (who was Modotti's beau at the time), led to an exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum with Weston, along with Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange. His first one–man exhibition came in 1932 in Mexico City. Soon afterward he met the American photographer Paul Strand and French portraitist Henri Cartier–Bresson. Alvarez Bravo exhibited with Cartier–Bresson in 1934 at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. In 1935, the two exhibited again, along with Walker Evans, in New York.

In the 1930s, Alvarez Bravo began a teaching career that lasted for more than 30 years. He taught at various schools including the San Carlos Academy, the Center of Cinematographic Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the Central School of Art. His unusual teaching style combined with his anonymity caused many students to eschew his classes. When most students were wanting to study filmmaking, Alvarez Bravo was taking them out to the countryside, having them set up cameras, and then waiting for something to happen.

Alvarez Bravo's work grew from many influences. As a child growing up during the Mexican revolution, he encountered death almost daily. Mexico had lost more than a million people in the conflict, and many bodies lay decomposing in the countryside where he played. The influence of his international contemporaries led to the creation of photographs that were filled with symbolism. His work was also guided by his association with Mexico's left–wing intellectual and political community.

Early in his career Alvarez Bravo sought out the intimate details of daily life in Mexico City. Photographs like The Crouched Ones, which shows workers sitting at a counter with their backs to the camera, is extraordinary because the lighting and composition make them appear decapitated as well as chained to their chairs.

As he matured, Alvarez Bravo became interested in creating meaning, however ambivalent, and began setting up scenes to be photographed. One of his most famous photographs made in this fashion is The Good Reputation Sleeping. The photograph was commissioned by French surrealist André Breton for the cover of his catalogue of the surrealist exhibition in Mexico City. In the photograph, a woman lies nude on a sidewalk, bandages are wrapped about her, and cacti are placed around her body.

In the 1940s, Alvarez Bravo began to focus on the Mexican landscape using wide–angle cameras. Praised from the beginning for his ability to link the past and the present in his work, these later photographs exemplified this strength in his work. His 1957 print Kiln Two shows two brick–making ovens with smoke pouring out their pointed tops. The photo harks back to Mexico's ancient history by referencing Mayan temples while also representing the effect of industrialization on the country.

Late in his life Alvarez Bravo found it hard to travel. He continued to photograph, but he worked primarily in his studio or his backyard photographing nudes as well as objects that were sent to him from colleagues, friends, and admirers. Although Alvarez Bravo enjoyed his work and did not complain, Jonathan Kandell of the New York Times reported that Alvarez Bravo said, "But the countryside, the daily life of the street is so much richer than doing nudes."

Despite having exhibited in the United States with some of its top photographers during the '20s and '30s, Alvarez Bravo eventually became unknown to many. In 1971, he was reintroduced to the United States and a wider audience when the Norton Simon Museum (at that time called the Pasadena Art Museum) launched a retrospective. The retrospective eventually traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Alvarez Bravo was honored again more than 30 years later on his 100th birthday with exhibitions at the J. Paul Getty Museum as well as other American museums

Alvarez Bravo married Lola Martinez de Anda in 1925, and divorced her in 1934. He then married and later divorced Doris Heyden. His widow is Colette Urbajtel whom he married in 1962. Alvarez Bravo died on October 19, 2002, at the age of 100. He is survived by his wife and five children. Alvarez Bravo was a leader in Mexico's artistic renaissance; his work focused on specifically Mexican subjects. Weston Naef, a curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum told the New York Times, "For Alvarez Bravo almost all of his greatest pictures were made within 100 miles of his home.… [He was] completely committed to a body of work that had its grounding in the soil from which he came."

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