Archive for the 'history' Category

Photographers often get inspirations from studying other artists’ works. My favorite media for that is still – even in the age of Internet – printed book. Nowadays I often have Ernst H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, in my hands, which has seen several editions since the fifties, and is available mostly as used copies today.
No, in this book you cannot see magazin shots or commercial photographs from for example Annie Leibovitz, Joe McNally or Chase Jarvis. And yet, I find myself turning back to one or two great paintings of some painters. My current favorite is the Milkmaid from Jan (Johannes) Vermeer.
(I know that his most famous painting is the Girl with a Pearl Earring, but because very few would believe me that the original model of that picture was not Scarlett Johansson I write about some others. )

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Lucien Hervé, French-Hungarian photographer, has passed away after long illness in the 97^th year of his life.

Hervé was born as László Elkán in 1910 in Hódmez?vásárhely, Hungary and was known as the most important architecture photographer of the twentieth century.
He studied economics in Vienna then moved to Paris where he met Robert Capa and Andre Kertész and made photo reports about the war for French magazines but got captured in 1940 and spent time in German captivity.
He started to paint in the early ‘40-s and his paintings were exhibited in 1942 and 1943.

In 1949 he met the architect Le Corbusier and made 650 shots in a day of a building of his that was being built in Marseille. Later he became Le Corbusier’s photographer and spent most of his time on the visual re-interpretation of the architect’s life-work. Eighteen-thousand of Hervé’s half million photographs are related to Corbusier’s works. Le Corbusier said that he had noticed such things on his buildings by Hervé’s pictures that he had not thought of before.

Hervé became the Knight of Order of Honour in 1991 for the role he played in the French Resistance during the Second World War II.

Lucien Hervé links:
Artnet
R A L P H: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities

Original article in Hungarian on index.hu

Twelve original photos made by Roger Fenton – one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century – have been found in the Library of Manuscripts and Rarities of Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary. These works from the dawn of photography are without example in Hungary and it is still a mystery how and when they got to the Library or even to the country.

Roger Fenton was a pioneer of photography and regarded as the first war photographer photo-documenting the Crimean War in 1855 in extremely difficult circumstances (he got cholera and broke several of his ribs).

The found photos were made as salted paper and albumen prints and require special protection and care. Ten of the twelve images – sized 30×40cm in average – were made in 1856, two in 1858 - as a trusted photography history expert determined.

Original article in Hungarian on index.hu