Professional Practice: LARGE FORMAT PHOTOGRAPHERS

SALLY MANN...

Sally Mann has used her 8 × 10 view camera to capture in fine detail, among other subjects, images of her children as they mimic and act out social and familial roles in the lush landscape of their rural Virginia home. For the series Immediate Family,posed or simply arrested in their activity, Mann’s children (who often appear nude) convey both primal and playful aspects of human behavior.

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/mann_sally.php

ANDREAS GURSKY...

Andreas Gursky's large-scale color photographs of landscapes, buildings, and masses of people have been likened to paintings. Gursky studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, where he honed his fascination with the ways people live in the world and how their existence impacts their surroundings. In the early 1990s he began using digital tools to heighten formal elements and circumvent the limits of perspective in his pictures.

http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/andreas-gursky/

EMMET GOWIN...

My pictures are made as a part of everyday life and are not the result of any project or assignment. Most of the pictures here were made with a camera on a tripod. In this situation, both the sitter and photographer become part of the picture. Sometimes my photographs resemble home snapshots, which are among the richest resources of images I know. But I always want to make a picture that is more than a family record. I feel that the clearest pictures were at first strange to me; yet whatever picture an artist makes, it is in part a picture of himself - a matter of identity.

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/G/gowin/gowin_articles1.html

BERND AND HILLA BECHER...

For nearly fifty years, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the industrial architecture of Western Europe, creating an archive of basic forms of the industrial era. Rendered with absolute precision in large format, medium-contrast gelatin silver prints, each structure is centered against a cloudless sky, filling the picture frame. The Bechers tended to arrange their photographs in grids or sequence them in monographs, a standardized presentation that facilitates a comparative analysis of form. Influenced by the objectivity of photographic practices between the two World Wars and embraced by practitioners of Minimalist and Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, the systematic nature of their approach has become a recognizable style.