Kennedy+Osterman+Master

Walker Evans is one of the leading photographers in the history of American documentary photography. Born in St. Louis, Evans studied at Williams College and the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1928, and five years later, though self-taught in photography, was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and had his photographs published in Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) and in Lincoln Kirstein's Hound & Horn (1931). Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1937, during which time he made many of the photographs for Walker Evans: American Photographs, an exhibition and publication organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938. In 1936 he took a leave from the FSA in order to document the living conditions of Alabama sharecropper families as part of a collaborative project with writer James Agee. The results were published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by Agee and photographs by Evans. Another of Evans's many photographic series was Many Are Called, comprised of images taken in the New York City subway system using a hidden camera between 1938 and 1945. Evans received three Guggenheim Fellowships and was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Between 1943 and 1965, he worked as a staff photographer for Time and Fortune. After retiring from professional photography in 1965, he taught graphic arts at Yale.
 * Walker Evens: **

Walker Evans's photographs were as prototypes both for the American documentary movement of the 1930s and for street photographers of the 1940s and 50s. His precisely composed, intricately detailed, spare photographs insisted on their subject matter, and his impartial acceptance of his subjects made his work seem true and aesthetically pure--qualities that have been the goal of documentary photography ever since. Later in his career he often photographed with the new Polaroid camera, which he used to depict street graffiti and various detritus of the contemporary world.

Ansel Adams, photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. When Adams was only four, an aftershock of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 threw him to the ground and badly broke his nose, distinctly marking him for life. A year later the family fortune collapsed in the financial panic of 1907, and Adams’s father spent the rest of his life doggedly but fruitlessly attempting to recoup. An only child, Adams was born when his mother was nearly forty. His relatively elderly parents, affluent family history, and the live-in presence of his mother’s maiden sister and aged father all combined to create an environment that was decidedly Victorian and both socially and emotionally conservative. Adams’s mother spent much of her time brooding and fretting over her husband’s inability to restore the Adams fortune, leaving an ambivalent imprint on her son. Charles Adams, on the other hand, deeply and patiently influenced, encouraged, and supported his son.
 * Ansel Adams:**

The story of the making of the photograph //Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico // is legendary. Ansel's description in //Examples: The Making of Forty Photographs // is oft repeated, and quite dramatic. We have brought together several vignettes that put a little more perspective on what let up to the dramatic moment on a lonely highway at 4:05 PM (local time), October 31, 1941.

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.”
 * Richard Avedon:**

What I will be going for in the project is with these artistes some of their picture are of people and them in motion. I wanted to take pictures form my brothers basketball games. And do pictures of them in action. And I will be editing them and putting the picture in black and white so I can get the dramatic in it too. Plus I really love my brothers because I don't know where I would be with out them. Being be able to have them in a project is really cool