Bruce Weber -photographer & filmmaker

Bruce Weber, (born March 29, 1946) is an American photographer and occasional filmmaker. He is most widely known for his ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch and Ralph Lauren.
He first came to the attention of the general public by shooting late 1980s and early 1990s iconographic ad images for omnisexual fashion company Calvin Klein. His straightforward black and white shots, featuring an unclothed heterosexual couple on a swing facing each other, two clothed men in bed, and model Marcus Schenkenberg barely holding jeans in front of himself in a shower, catapulted him into the national spotlight. His photo for Calvin Klein of Olympic athlete Tom Hintnaus in white briefs is a famous iconic image. He photographed the winter 2006 Ralph Lauren Collection.
Weber's photographs are occasionally in color, however most are in black and white or toned shades. They are gathered in limited edition print books, including but not limited to A House is Not a Home and Bear Pond, an early work which featured, among other models, Eric Nies from MTV's The Real World series.
Bruce Weber, brought the image of chiseled male beauty more into the public spotlight. Among others, he is known for his nude photographs of the Brewer twins and the Carlson twins. He has long been the photographer for Abercrombie, even when it was in its catalog days. Weber appears to be a favorite of Sam Shahid, Abercrombie's advertising representative, who used to work at Calvin Klein with Weber.
Weber is credited for launching the modeling career of Isabella Rossellini.

Bruce Weber Photos:

Clive Arrowsmith - Pirelli Calendar two years in succession

Clive Arrowsmith

Clive Arrowsmith is a London based, celebrated international photographer.

After leaving art school where he studied painting and design, he began taking photographs whilst working as a graphic designer for television.

Leaving television to work as a photographer, he soon gained commissions from leading fashion magazines, most notably, British & French Vogue, Harpers, The Sunday Times Colour Magazine,Vanity Fair, Esquire U.S.A, and F.T. "How to Spend It".

Clive continues to work in this genre in both editorial and advertising photography and is equally known for his music and celebrity images; Paul McCartney, Wings, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Daniel Barenboim, Anna Netrebko, Art Garfunkel, Def Leppard, Prince Charles, Michael Caine and Damien Hirst to name a few.

Clive is also an accomplished landscape and still life photographer.
Clive Arrowsmith is the only photographer to have photographed the Pirelli Calendar two years in succession. (1991 and 1992)
Having worked on many major stills advertising campaigns; De Beers, Revlon, G.H.D. Morello, Caroline Castigliano, Lexus, Hassleblad etc, Clive has continued to broaden his creative scope moving on to direct commercials for Heinz, Revlon, Hamlet Cigars (winner of The Silver Lion Cannes Film Festival), Rapeed Sunglasses, Greenmail Whitney Beer and music videos of artists like Lee Griffiths, Jamiroquai, Jools Holland, ZTT and Def Leppard

Clive has recently been working in Taiwan on the Free Tibet campaign with the Heavy Metal band, Chthonic, and has also photographed His Holiness the Dalai Lama several times.

 Clive Arrowsmith Photos:

Dalai Lama

Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney

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:

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

Brian Duffy - man of ART

Brian Duffy - self portrait

First years


Duffy was born to Irish parents in London in 1933. During World War II he was evacuated with his two brothers and sister to Kings Langley where he was taken in by the actors Roger Livesey and Ursula Jeans. After only three weeks his mother, unhappy about her four children being split up from the family insisted they all return to London. They were evacuated once more to Wales but returned to London having experienced living on a primitive farm after a month.
In 1950 he began  St. Martins School of Art at first wishing to be a painter but soon changed to dress design. He finished in 1953 and immediately began working as an assistant designer at Susan Small Dresses after which he worked for Victor Steibel, preferred designer to Princess Margaret.


Professional career


In 1955 he began freelancing as a fashion artist for Harper's Bazaar. It was here that he first came into contact with photography. Inspired by the photographic contact sheets he saw passing through the art director's desk he decided to find a job as a photographers assistant. Unsuccessfully, he applied for a job with John French, after which he managed to get a job at Carlton studios and then at Cosmopolitan Artists. He left there to take a job as assistant the photographer Adrian Flowers. While working for Flowers he received his first photographic commission from Ernestine Carter, the then fashion editor of The Sunday Times.
In 1957 he was hired by British Vogue where he remained working until 1963. During this period he worked closely with top models of the period, including Joy Weston, Jennifer Hocking, Paulene Stone and Jean Shrimpton.
Apart from Vogue, Duffy also worked for publications including Glamour, Esquire, Town Magazine, Queen Magazine as well as The Observer, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. He also worked on contract for French Elle for two periods the first between 1963 and 1968, and the second between 1971 and 1979.
In 1965 Duffy was asked to create a Pirelli calendar which he shot on location in Monaco. He was commissioned to shoot a second calendar in 1973 which he created in collaboration with British pop artist Allen Jones and air brush specialist Phillip Castle

One morning in 1979, Brian Duffy, then one of the most famous photo-graphers in the world, came into work. One of his assistants told him they had run out of toilet paper. His memory is hazy, he admits, but what happened next became an ­episode of snapper folklore.
"He realised," he recalls in a documentary that airs on BBC4 ­tonight, " that He was making decisions about toilet ­paper. And He thought This has got to end. Either by me murdering my staff, killing myself, or setting fire to the whole fucking thing." So he gathered every negative and transparency he had ever shot and burned them on a fire in his back garden. After that, he never took another picture.
Except, as it turns out, negatives do not easily catch fire. And when they do, they produce an acrid black smoke: this bonfire ended when an official from Camden council peered over the fence and insisted Duffy put it out. Duffy packed what remained away in shoeboxes in his attic and turned to painting and furniture-restoring. It was only in 2007, when his son Chris went through the boxes, that he reluctantly agreed that they were worth another look. This led to a show in London last year – the first, anywhere, of his career.
To devotees of photography, these surviving pictures were like a salvaged stack from the library at Alexandria. Lost portraits of Michael Caine, John Lennon, Nina Simone, William Burroughs, ­Reggie Kray and many more. And ­fashion shots that remind us how this man  created the visual spirit of the swinging 60s: making ­fashion fun, colloquial, young.
In 2009, at the behest of his son, Chris, Duffy resumed work as a photographer and shot images of people he had photographed in the 1960s and  70s.
Duffy died on 31 May 2010, after suffering from a degenerative lung disease

Brian Duffy photos

John Lennon

Arnold Schwarzenegger

David Dowie