Nr. 411 photographer , but with big future - Adam Amengual

Adam Amengual was born in Queens, NY and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His father Angelo gave him his first camera at 12 and he started documenting his friends and his surroundings. After studying the basics of photography in high school he continued his photographic education at both Massachusetts College of Art and Parsons School of Design. After art school Adam moved to Brooklyn, NY and began assisting photographers in advertising, fashion, celebrity, and music. Over the past 6 years he has assisted many well established photographers. He has worked with Ruven Afanador, Don Flood, Danielle Levitt, Norman Jean Roy, Art Streiber, and Ben Watts, just to name a few.


Adam is currently located in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Kate and dog Shug. His clients include The U.S. State Department via Lipman Hearne, Inc. Magazine, Time Out New York, California Real Estate Magazine, Swindle Magazine, New York Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Sony BMG, Nobu and Tank Theory. His work has been shown in galleries at THIS Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts Boston. His recently completed project entitle "Homies" has been featured on several blogs including Time's LightBox, Prison Photography, This Is the What, Conscientious, and We Can Shoot Too and is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.


Adam was also just recently awarded with an honorable mention in En Foco's New Works Photography Awards #15 Fellowship, 2011-12 and was just named number 411 on Peiter Wisse's 500 Photographers.


Adam Amenguel PHOTOS:

material from PHOTOblog

Herbert "HERB" Ritts

Herbert Ritts, Jr. enjoyed a comfortable childhood. Born on August 13, 1952 to parents who owned a profitable furniture business in California, Ritts was part of a family who lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills and also had a summer home on fashionable Santa Catalina Island. Young Ritts grew up in glamorous surroundings, with movie stars for neighbors.

Ritts had not decided what profession to pursue, but he certainly was not considering a career in photography, which he had only recently taken up as a hobby. It happened, however, that in 1978 he had his camera with him when he and a friend, the then little-known actor Richard Gere, had to stop at a gas station to repair a flat tire.

He photographed Brooke Shields for the cover of the Oct. 12, 1981 edition of Elle and he photographed Olivia Newton-John for her Physical album in 1981. Five years later he would replicate that cover pose with Madonna for her 1986 release True Blue.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts photographed notables such as, Christopher Reeve, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Francesco Clemente, George Clooney, Cher, Mel Gibson, Elizabeth Taylor, Brad Pitt, Ronald Reagan, Julia Roberts, Steven Hawking, Nicole Kidman, Edward Norton, Tom Cruise, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dizzy Gillespie, Elton John, Annette Benning, Antonio Banderas,  Jack Nicholson, , and many others.

He took many fashion and nude photos of supermodel Cindy Crawford and eventually set her up with his good friend, actor Richard Gere, at a BBQ held at his mother Shirley's house. The couple married four years later in 1991, but divorced in 1995.

He also worked for the magazines, Interview, Esquire, Mademoiselle, Glamour, GQ, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone, Time, Vogue, Allure, Vanity Fair, Details, and Elle. He photographed Prince for his The Hits/The B-Sides greatest-hits package released in 1993. He published many books on photography for leading fashion designers including, Giorgio Armani, Revlon, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Gianni Versace, Calvin Klein, Elizabeth Arden, Donna Karan, Cartier, Guess, Maybelline, TAG Heuer, Lacoste, Gianfranco Ferrè, Levi's, Victoria's Secret, Gap, Acura, CoverGirl, Lancôme, and Valentino. From 1996 to 1997 his work was displayed at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, attracting more than 250,000 people to the exhibit and in 2003 a solo exhibition was held at the Daimaru Museum, in Kyoto, Japan.

He also take photos for Pirelli calendar at 1994 in Paradise Island, the Bahamas.

Herb Ritts photos:

Mr. Arthur Elgor - "snapshot" icon

Arthur Elgort was born in 1940 and raised in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School and then Hunter College where he studied painting. Finding painting to be too lonely an art form, he moved on to photography which he took to naturally. He began his career working as a photo assistant to Gus Peterson whose natural shooting style greatly contributed to the lively and casual style Mr. Elgort is so well known for today. He also attributes much of his style to a lifelong love of music and dance, particularly jazz and ballet.
Elgort's 1971 debut in British Vogue created a sensation in the Fashion Photography world where his soon-to-be iconic "snapshot" style and emphasis on movement and natural light liberated the idea of fashion photography. In September 2008, he told Teen Vogue that he credited Mademoiselle for his big break: "They were really brave and gave me a chance. It was the first time I was shooting a cover instead of a half-page here or there." From there, he rose to fame working for such elite magazines as International and American Vogue, Glamour, GQ, Rolling Stone, and Teen Vogue among others and shooting advertising campaigns with numerous international fashion labels such as Chanel, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent. Elgort quickly became one of the most well-known and emulated photographers in the world. His early body of work from the 70's and 80's is often considered representative of the fashion industry at the time.
Arthur Elgort published his first of several books, Personal Fashion Photographs, in 1983 and later his world wide best seller Models Manual during the super model boom in 1994. His other two books, Camera Crazy  and Camera Ready , focus on his love of cameras and taking pictures.
Today Elgort continues shooting for American Vogue and many other Conde Nast publications, as well as working on his most recent 2009 advertising campaigns with Via Spiga and Liz Claiborne with Isaac Mizrahi. He lives in New York City with his wife and three children.


Arthur Elgor photos:

Robert Freeman - Beatles favorite photographer

Photographer, designer, and cameraman Robert Freeman is most famous for photographing and designing five of the Beatles album covers, in addition to some other tasks he carried out on their behalf. After graduating from Cambridge in 1959, he became a professional photographer, with assignments for The Sunday Times and other magazines. One of his assignments was photographing jazz musicians at a London jazz festival, which led to a portfolio including portraits of John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Elvin Jones, and Coleman Hawkins. These were the photos he sent to Beatles manager Brian Epstein in the summer of 1963, after a friend who had filmed the group for Granada Television tipped Freeman off that the Beatles would make good photographic subjects. He was a photographer for  Pirelli calendar in 1964...

In the 1960s, Freeman was married to a German-born model - known at the time as Sonny Freeman, with whom he had two children. He was later married to author Tiddy Rowan with whom he had a daughter. There was a romor that Freemans wife,Sonny Drane (a model and 1964 Pirelli calendar-girl), had a year-lon had a affair with John Lennon


Freemans photos:

Terence Donovan - fachion phography matter

Terence Donovan was a celebrated photographer and film director, perhaps best remembered for his fashion photography of the 1960s, or for the music video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love". 

He was born in Stepney in the East End of London, and took his first photo at the age of 15. The bomb-damaged industrial landscape of his home town became the backdrop of much of his fashion photography, and he set the trend for positioning fashion models in stark and gritty urban environments.

Along with David Bailey, he captured, and in many ways helped create the Swinging London of the 1960s: a culture of high fashion and celebrity chic. Both photographers socialised with actors, musicians and royalty, and found themselves elevated to celebrity status. Together, they were the first real celebrity photographers.

Donovan shot for various fashion magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, as well as directing some 3000 commercials, and a 1973 movie Yellow Dog. He also made documentaries and music videos, and painted.

Inevitably, Donovan brought these two distinct approaches to magazine portraiture too. His first photograph for Vogue, for example, a portrait of the conductor George Solti walking the streets of Covent Garden, is a skilful long-lens observation shot, but throughout the 1970s and 1980s and frequently for Vogue, he concentrated on the studio portrait, wherein any element of chance was, for the most part, removed. The results - most particularly a series of headshots of the comedians Max Wall, Norman Wisdom and the writer and wit Osbert Lancaster - are determinedly unflattering with no indulgence to the sitter’s vanity or the ‘look’ of the magazine. From 1970, while continuing to shoot fashion for a variety of magazines, he explored in earnest the more lucrative field of advertising photography, also turning his hand to the moving image.




 

Vintage prints of Donovan’s fashion and portrait work, particularly those from the 1960s and 1970s, are rare. Even more so are ‘signed’ works. He belonged to the generation that never considered that there could ever be a market for what was essentially commercial photography, no matter how accomplished. Donovan’s diffidence went further. As a working photographer he spurned compilations of his work or exhibitions of past highpoints, because, presumably, he felt the best was still to come. In his lifetime, he published only three books of his photographs. None was particularly historical nor any an anthology of his greatest moments and all were idiosyncratic. The first in 1964 Women Throoo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan, was a slim booklet of women he had recently photographed . Glances, the second, coming nearly twenty years later in 1983, was a book of nudes and the third and last, Fighting Judo from 1985, the most unexpected: a ‘blow-by-blow’ manual of judo moves. (Donovan was a black belt 1st dan).

Unsurprisingly, there are few signed prints in the Donovan archive. However, what has surfaced is a cache of contact photographs, curiously authenticated. For the decade 1959 to the end of the 1960s, Donovan separated from his contact sheets, and invariably printed up to the standard of a finished print, those images he favoured for publication – promptly stabbing them clean through with the point of a pencil. This is surely a forceful stamp of authorship and authority from one of British photography’s foremost identities. And one whom, it must be said, made strenuous efforts to avoid a conventional photographic legacy.

Donovan committed suicide in 1996 after suffering depression as a result of steroids he'd been taking to treat a skin condition.

Terence Donovan photos:

Norman Parkinson - out of the studio

Norman Parkinson (21 April 1913 – 15 February 1990) 

 "I like to make people look as good as they'd like to look, and with luck, a shade better"

English photographer and eccentric whose career saw fashion photography transform itself from decorative depiction of aristocratic ladies to a more commercial and democratic medium. After apprenticeship to the court photographers Speaight & Sons of Bond Street, he set up his own studio at the age of 21. Like Cecil Beaton, Parkinson was noted for taking his sitters out of the studio and encouraging them to move naturally, resulting in elegant portraits captured in contrastingly grimy or working‐class environments. Sittings with contemporary figures including the Sitwells, Vaughan Williams, and Kathleen Ferrier for publications such as The Bystander, Life, and Look led to a close relationship with Condé Nast from the 1940s to the late 1970s. Parkinson pioneered the outdoor use of colour photography with then difficult to source early 35 mm stock, which he used for landmark fashion imagery for American Vogue. Many models were exulted to fame by Parkinson including Celia Hammond (who he discovered for Queen magazine), Jan Ward, Adele Collins, Davina Taylor, Carmen dell'Orefice, Enid Boulting and the first 'supermodel' and wife of fellow photographer Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives.He spotted Nena von Schlebrügge, the mother of Uma Thurman at age 16 when she left her senior school in Stockholm, and brought her to London to model for Vogue Magazine.
In 1963, Parkinson moved from Twickenham to Tobago, where he set up a pig farm and marketed his famous ‘Porkinson's Bangers’ sausages. One of the first fashion photographers to enjoy personal celebrity, he was latterly known as the unofficial royal portraitist.

"The only thing that gets in the way of a really good photograph, is the camera".

Norman Parkinson Photo Gallery

Harry Peccanotti - most talented men to ever hold a camera.

Every photographer who’s made a career out of pressing shutter buttons in front of beautiful women owes a great debt to Harri Peccinotti. He was the first person to consistently capture the sexuality of everyday activities on camera: subversively pleasing sights like girls carefully sucking on popsicles, close-ups of butts on bike seats, and California beach bunnies unknowingly shot with telephoto lenses.

Harry Peccanotti at work

Biography


Harry Peccanotti (also known as Harri Peccinotti) is a photographer, known for his erotic work.He was born in London in 1935. At 14, he dropped out of school to design album covers for the jazz label Esquire Records. In the 50s, he began working as an advertising photographer and eventually served as art director for glossy behemoths like Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Vanity Fair UK. But he will forever be remembered as the main brain behind Nova, a British magazine first published in 1965 that set new standards for both graphic and journalistic content by integrating ideas borrowed from the psychedelic subculture and underground press of the day.

In ’68, after completing an assignment in Vietnam, he photographed the now legendary Pirelli pinup calendar that paired love poems with photographic interpretations of the verses—alluring, tastefully shot women lounging around the Tunisian island of Djerba. Pirelli—and everyone in the world who wasn’t blind—liked it so much they invited him back the following year. This time Harri proceeded to up the raunch factor by featuring the aforementioned California girls in various states of undress.

Harri’s recent endeavors have focused on ethnographic reportage, filmmaking, and publishing books of his work. He also continues to shoot fashion and advertisements and is a photography consultant for the weekly French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

His life's work is celebrated in the retrospective book "HP" by Harri Peccinotti.


Covers of Nova Magazine that was made by Harri Peccinotti

Harry Peccanotti Photo Gallery