Brooke Wills: 3 Photographers

AJ Wilkinson

Born in Manchester, UK in 1963, AJ Wilkinson is an educator that attended the University of Salford and Staffordshire University. He is still alive, and is quite active on Google Blogger, Instagram and Facebook where he frequently uploads his own work and doesn't hesitate to comment on the work of others. He has not reached the same level of notoriety as the other photographers I've focused on, which has made it extremely difficult to find information about him because he is not widely known yet. What I find interesting about his work is that it gives you the feeling hes just going about his daily life when he photographs. He could be eating a sandwich, or driving home, or taking his dog for a walk, and see something that he likes enough to photograph. It gives you the sense that you could do a similar job, but the truth is just the opposite. He relies on leading lines to frame his artwork, and the whole series emits a sense of mastery and competency that many photographers could only hope to have.

Inge Morath

Born in Austria in 1923, Inge studied languages in Berlin in order to become a translator and later a journalist based in Munich. She was a friend of Ernst Haas, who also fully embraced the use of color film as it rose to prominence in the 1950s-1960s. She used her talents as a journalist to write pieces to accompany his photographs, and was soon invited to work for the Magnum agency as an editor and researcher. Inge acknowledged that she had never seriously occupied herself with photography, but that she had always been passionately interested in painting and drawing. She was also the only one in the agency that had not begun photographing, and would spend nights in the darkrooms with professionals as a free assistant in order to fully immerse herself in the art of photography. 1951 was the first year she began photographing, and she traveled all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East to do it. She used her used Leica camera to mainly photograph portraits, but was also skilled at photographing distinguishable places (such as Mao Zedong's bedroom) and knew when and how to subtly incorporate color into her work. Her pictures are distinguishable from other artists because although she did use black and white and then turn to colored film, I think her colored photographs are much more subtle than others' images. She uses colors to support the subject of her photos, and to me her work very much reflects real life. The aspect about her work that I like the most is the way that though her subjects are usually people or important places, they do not feel staged. To me, her photos signify the existence of eras past, and the way she uses color suggests that I could walk outside right now and see some of the same scenarios occurring as in her photos.
  

Donald Blumberg

An American photographer, Donald Blumberg was born in 1935 and initially studied as a scientist, earning degrees in biology from Cornell University and the University in Colorado in 1961. However, he was exposed to words by J.W.M. Turner's seascapes and Byzantine mosaics on a trip to Europe during graduate school, and changed course to live in New York and began to photograph subjects in the streets. He turned his attention in the 1960s to focus on how the media covered essential events in American history, such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, and used his photographs to analyze how news and information was delivered by the media to the people of the United States. He used his large format Polaroid camera to photograph shows on the television screen, newspaper headlines, billboards, advertisements, and more. Blumberg only photographed in black and white for a couple of reasons: one of which is that all the serious photographs of his time were in black and white, and the other is that his subjects would not have had the same grandeur and importance if they had been photographed in color. I particularly love how Donald Blumberg's work isn't focused on the objects themselves that he photographs, but he uses them to show a time, a common feeling or emotion amongst people and the medium that would deliver news, good or bad to regular people.