Task 1a

Histoical Photographers

Irving Penn

Irving Penn, born June 16^th 1917 in New Jersey, best known for his fashion photography, startlingly exposing portraits of celebrities and still life, trained first as a painter at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. His career includes work for Vogue magazine and independent advertising for clients. Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1934 until 1938 to study drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts. 

He continued to paint and draw throughout his long career as a photographer, and it is these skills of draughtsmanship and composition that are most firmly pronounced in his less renowned still lives, in which he created the most unusual and beautiful configurations of foodstuffs, fashion and animals.

 Even though Penn was best known for this fashion photography he did some still life of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects; and photographic travel essays. Irving Penn was one of the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and he effectively used this simplicity.

Alexander Liebermann had commissioned Penn to shoot the cover. Yet the result was the work of a consummate master – an elegant visual vignette of belt, bag, gloves and lemons that fronted the magazine in 1943, and which would be the beginning of collaboration between man and magazine that lasted over half a century.

Irving Penn, Frozen Foods with String Beans, 1977

Irving Penn, Cholesterol’s Revenge, 1994

Irving Penn, Ripe Cheese, 1992

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston was born March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois. He spent the majority of his childhood in Chicago where he attended Oakland Grammar School. He began photographing when he was 16 when he received a camera from his father. Some of his first photographs were of the parks in Chicago and his aunt’s farm. 

Weston left Chicago in the spring of 1906 and moved near May's home in Tropico, California (now a neighbourhood in Glendale). He decided to stay there and pursue a career in photography, but he soon realized he needed more professional training. A year later he moved to Effingham, Illinois, in order to enroll in the Illinois School of Photography. They taught a nine-month course, but Weston finished all of the class work in six months. The school refused to give him a diploma unless he paid for the full nine months; Weston refused and instead moved back to California in the spring of 1908.

Henry Fox Talbot

He was born on 11^th February 1800 in Dorset, England.

The invention of photography is the reason that Henry Talbot's reputation will always be strongest. In October 1833, he had his famous intellectual breakthrough. In the company of his sisters and his new wife on the shores of Italy's Lake Como, he found himself in the frustrating position of being the only one in the group unable to sketch the scenery.

As he explained in the introduction to the Pencil of Nature in 1844: "when the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold." A decade before, also in Italy, Talbot had tried to sketch using the common artist's tool, the camera obscura, but with no better success.

Pencils of Nature (1846)

During November 1838, Henry Talbot finally returned to his photographic experiments and started drawing up a paper for presentation to the Royal Society. In a brutal shock just weeks later, word came from Paris in January 1839 that Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre had frozen the images of the camera obscura. With no details disclosed, Talbot was placed in the dilemma of the loss of his discovery if Daguerre's method proved identical to his. In the gloomy light of an English winter, Talbot could not demonstrate his own process, but on 25 January Michael Faraday displayed some of Talbot's still-preserved examples from 1835 at the Royal Institution.

 On 31 January, Talbot's "Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing" was read before the Royal Society. This hastily written but wide-ranging paper gave a new name to his process and explored many of its implications. Three weeks later, Talbot detailed his working procedures before the Royal Society.

Contemporary Photographers

 

Francesco Tonelli

He was born in Marche, Italy but was raised in Milan (he is now based in New Jersey). He originally started out as a chef but then took on the career of being a food photographer. He is a food photographer who also cooks and styles the majority of the food that he shoots. His main work is advertising food products which include taking photographs for well-known food products such as Knoss. 

Tonelli has had an interview in The Digital Camera magazine about his work in food photography. In the magazine article, he mentioned that he had done some work with big clients which include; The New York Times, Coca Cola, Chobani, Swanson, Kraft, Pepsi Cola, Visa and many more. He also mentioned: “When I was a chef in Italy, I was working alongside photographers for about a decade – I developed new recipes for a culinary magazine, then tested and styled them so they could be photographed and published.” 

He decided he wanted to become a food photographer because he, of course, loves food and he was fascinated by the photographic process, the reason it took him so long to finally pursue the career of being  photographer is because he thought the cameras seemed too big and complicated and taking photo’s had never crossed his mind. He was never really interested in photography to begin with and didn’t even own a camera until 1998 when he went to the USA and bought one of the first digital cameras for consumers. Another thing he says in the magazine is that photography was only a hobby to start with then it became a passion. He then began to start reading about Photoshop and photography, after doing so, he followed a photographers advice and made his own pin whole camera.

Francesco only realised thing were getting serious when Coca Cola asked him to do a project with them, he then considered to be a professional. He says he cooks and prepares all of his food himself, takes pictures of them and he said he also eats the food after he is done. 

Jean Cazals

Jean Cazals, a London based photographer, born in Paris, was awarded "Best Food Photographer of 2012" along with other awards. After a sucessful decade of portraiture for editorial, advertising and desgin clients, he had a stint for 2 years of shooting commercial. Loving food and travel for years brought him naturally to turn to photographing food and lifestyle.

He has shot over 80 books. As an auther and a photographer, Jean was awarded for his book "Teatime", the "Gourmand Best Dessert Cookbook UK 2013" award. He also does consultation and advice fo publishing for new projects.

Jean shoots from his Notting Hill studio when he isn’t travelling overseas for his international clients. His approach is clean, graphic and moody, based on natural light, elegant styling & food presentation. His field of photography covers books but as well as packaging, design, editorial, restaurants website and advertising.  

Cazals work has been featured in many well-known magazines, advertisments and books such as; House & Garden, Delicious, Food & Travel, Elle, Marie Claire, Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue Entertaining and Travel, Martha Stewart's Living, Brides, Sunday Times, The Telegraph Mag, Olive Food Arts, M&S mag and more. 

Beth Galton



Beth Galton, one of New York's top food and still-life photographers, graduated from Hiram College, with a degree in studio art. Her attention to detail and strong sense of composition has allowed her to acquire a noteworthy client list including; Hellmann’s, Swanson Broth, Campbell’s Soup, Wendy’s, Kraft Foods, Stouffers, Nabisco, St. Ives and Amala skincare. Beth’s photographs have been published in many cookbooks and her work is exhibited periodically. She has received numerous awards from the Communication Arts, Graphic, The Art Director’s Club, One Show and most recently named one of Lürzer’s Int’l Archive’s ‘200 Best Advertising Photographers’ of 2010 & 2011.

In her work, she experiments and plays around with the food to show more creativity. Some of the work she has done with food is called “Cut food” because she cut the food in half to show what it looks like inside; from eggs to popcorn to a thoroughly stuffed turkey, this process is a really interesting way to photograph food as it’s completely different from anything you would naturally see. There is a Ted Talk (a YouTube series) of Nathan Myhrvold talking about the process, combining food and science to create images like these.