Richard Avedon     (aperture spring 2009)

Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family of dress manufacturers, and his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, owned a clothing store called Avedon's Fifth Avenue. Inspired by his parents' clothing businesses, as a boy Avedon took a great interest in fashion, especially enjoying photographing the clothes in his father's store. At the age of 12, he joined the YMHA (Young Men's Hebrew Association) Camera Club.

Avedon later described one childhood moment in particular as helping to kindle his interest in fashion photography: “One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows,” he remembered. “In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper's Bazaar. I didn't understand why he'd taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.”

Avedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, where one of his classmates and closest friends was the great writerJames Baldwin. In addition to his continued interest in fashion and photography, in high school Avedon also developed an affinity for poetry. He and Baldwin served as co-editors of the school's prestigious literary magazine, The Magpie, and during his senior year, in 1941, Avedon was named “Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools.” After graduating that summer, Avedon enrolled at Columbia University to study philosophy and poetry. However, he dropped out after only one year to serve in the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. As a Photographer's Mate Second Class, his main duty was taking identification portraits of sailors. Avedon served in the Merchant Marine for two years, from 1942 to 1944.

                 Jonathan Torgovnik                           (aperture spring 2009)

Jonathan Torgovnik graduated with a BFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he studied Photography and Fine Arts. Jonathan's photographs from various projects and assignments have been published by: The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, GQ, GEO, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Wired, Stern, Paris Match, Le Monde 2, The Telegraph Magazine, Mother Jones, Aperture, Smithsonian Magazine, and CNN among many others. Torgovnik is the author of two books: Bollywood Dreams; An Exploration of the Motion Picture Industry, and it's Culture in India (Phaidon, 2003), and Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape (Aperture, 2009). Torgovnik's award-winning photographs have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe and are in the permanent collections of museums and institutions such as The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Bibliotheque National De France in Paris, and the Library of congress, Washington, DC.

Michael Carroll

Michael Carroll Biography

Mike Carroll is the founder and current President of Romanian Children's Relief and their Romanian partner charity, Fundatia Inocenti. In January 1990, Carroll was one of the first photographers to travel to Romania after the fall of the communist regime. His stories, which were written and photographed for The Boston Globe and The New York Times, led directly to the formation of the Romanian Children's Relief organization.

Since 1980, Mike has worked as a freelance photographer and media-design consultant specializing in corporate and editorial photography with clients including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, People, Golf & Travel, Travel & Leisure Golf, Newsweek, Business Week, Money and Fortune.

Since 1990, Carroll has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe writing and photographing for American and European publications, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, People, Fortune and Reader's Digest.

His corporate clients have included Disney, Compaq, Malden Mills, Beth Israel Hospital, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, American Express and General Motors Corp.

www.sxu.edu

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe, Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849. He worked as a carpenter in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States in 1870. Unable to find work, he was often forced to spend the night in police station lodging houses. Riis did a variety of menial jobs before finding work with a news bureau in New York City in 1873. The following year he was recruited by the South Brooklyn News. In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate". In 1888 Riis was employed as a photo-journalist by the New York Evening Sun. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which enabled him to photograph interiors and exteriors of the slums at night. He also became associated with what later became known as muckraking journalism. In December, 1889, an account of city life, illustrated by photographs, appeared in Scribner's Magazine. This created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length version, How the Other Half Lives, was published. The book was seen by Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Police Commissioner, and he had the city police lodging houses that were featured in the book closed down. (Us arises.htm)

Robert Frank

Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. His mother, Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World War I and had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall's, Vogue, and Fortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s. (Wikipedia)