In 1936 Roy Stryker recruited him to join a small group of photographers working for the FSA. This group included Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Mary Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn. These photographers were employed to publicize the conditions of the rural poor in America.

During the Second World War he worked as a photographer for the Office of War Information in Washington, D.C. He was also employed by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

Vachon became a staff photographer for Life Magazine in 1947. In 1949, he starting working for Look Magazine where he remained for twenty-two years. After the closure of this magazine he became a freelance photographer and a visiting lecturer at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

John Vachon died in New York on 20th April 1975.

More at JillFreedman.com

Bill Gedney was an immersion photographer. He jumped into and shared the lives of his subjects to a level of intimacy that few photographers would dare to risk. Bill’s most recognized work stems from journeys he made away from his native Brooklyn to ever-further locales, documenting through his eyes those lives he shared if ever so briefly. Kentucky, San Francisco, and India — these were the three stops where he completed some of his most haunting work.

In 1966, Bill received a Guggenheim fellowship to photograph “American life”. Gedney left Brooklyn and drove cross-country to the West Coast, and ended up in San Francisco in October, 1966. He spent the next three-plus months in California, taking several thousand photographs of the people he met and the activities that he observed. As he did earlier when he traveled to Kentucky (in 1964) Bill lived as close to his subjects as possible. In Kentucky, he moved in with a coalminer family. In San Francisco, he moved in with a crash pad family. He followed this group of approximately six young street people as they moved through the Haight Ashbury. Through these experiences, Bill was exposed to the street life as no other photographer did.

William Gedney died of AIDS in 1989 in New York City and is buried in Greenville, New York, a few short miles from his childhood home. He left his photographs and writings to his life long friend Lee Friedlander.

Thousands of Gedney’s images are online at Duke University.

In 1976, Nachtwey started working as a newspaper photographer for the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico. In 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 – 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Palazzo Esposizione in Rome, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Culturgest in Lisbon, El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, the Canon Gallery and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the Carolinum in Prague,and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, among others.

During has career, Nachtwey has received numerous honours such as the Common Wealth Award, Martin Luther King Award, Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award, Henry Luce Award, Robert Capa Gold Medal (five times), the World Press Photo Award (twice), Magazine Photographer of the Year (seven times), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award (three times), the Leica Award (twice), the Bayeaux Award for War Correspondents (twice), the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award, the Canon Photo essayist Award and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant in Humanistic Photography. He is a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and has an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Arts.

More of James Natchwey’s work can be viewed at JamesNachtwey.com and at Fahey Klein Gallery.

Sudek’s work first appeared in America in 1974 when the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, gave him a retrospective exhibition. The same year Light Gallery in New York City showed an exhibition of his photographs. On his 80th birthday in April, 1976, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague inaugurated a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Sudek’s work which later appeared at the Photographer’s Gallery, London.

In spite of his disability, Sudek always used large format cameras and from the 1940′s on he made only contact prints. He worked without assistants in the open air in city and countryside. His hunched figure supporting a huge wooden tripod was a familiar sight in Prague. Although he never married and was rather shy, he was not a recluse and was renowned for his weekly soirees for listening to classical music from his vast record collection. Sudek died quietly and without suffering or illness in mid-September 1976 in Prague. He published 16 books during his life.

Over a hundred of Josef Sudek’s photos can be viewed at artpages.org.ua.

More of Paul Strand’s work can be seen at photography-now.net.

Roy DeCarava, one of my Friday Inspirations back in August passed away this week at the age of 89.

Roy DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work, he began to gravitate toward photography, in part because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. Over a career spanning almost 70 years, DeCarava came to be regarded as the founder of a school of African-American photography that broke with the social documentary traditions of his time. He turned his neighborhood of Harlem into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people

The NY Times has a slideshow and more information.

In 1963, Winograd made his first notable appearance at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1966, Winogrand exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon. In 1967, he participated in a show at the MoMA with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. During his career, he received three Guggenheim Fellowship Awards (1964, 1969, and 1979) and a National Endowment of the Arts Award in 1979. Winogrand also taught photography courses at the University of Texas at Austin and at the Art Institute of Chicago.

When Gary Winogrand passed away in 1984, he left behind nearly 300,000 unedited images and more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film.

More of Garry Winogrand’s images can be seen on the Museum of Modern Art’s website.

After being fired in 1939, he decided to become an independent photojournalist, but instead was called by the French army. He worked for the French Resistance until the end of the war, during which time he produced postcards to earn money. In 1949, Doisneau signed a contract with Vogue, and worked there for three years. In 1952, he finally started working as a freelance photographer. Doisneau died in April, 1994 in Paris.

More of Robert Doisneau’s images can be see at photography-now.net.

Erwitt traveled in France and Italy in 1949 with his trusty Rolleiflex camera. In 1951 he was drafted for military service and served as a photographer’s assistant while serving in a unit of the Army Signal Corps in Germany and France. In 1953 Erwitt joined Magnum Photos and worked as a freelance photographer for Collier’s, Look, Life and Holiday. In the late 1960s, Erwitt served as Magnum’s president for three years.

Erwitt has had numerous one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, Zurich’s Kunsthaus and Cologne’s Photokina.  Several editions of a large retrospective exhibition based on his book Personal Exposures have been touring the United States, Europe and Japan since 1989.  With over 15 books to his name and multiple terms as President of Magnum, Erwitt is still for hire and continues to work for a variety of journalistic and commercial outfits.

More of Elliot Erwitt’s work can be seen on ElliottErwitt.com, Magnum Photos, and Polka Galerie.

Spend a few hours looking through photos at artcoup.com and tinyvices.com.

New York Times has a recent article and there’s another good interview at PingMag.

Shomei Tomatsu helped found an agency called Vivo, a group of young photographers who reached a broad public during the 1950s and 1960s by publishing their 35mm black and white images anonymously in magazines. Vivo’s members also exhibited their work in galleries as individual artists. Thus Tomatsu’s name and work came to be indelibly associated with postwar Japanese photography; for many years his images were created within Japan for a Japanese audience. After his initial engagement with the devastation and military occupation of post WWII Japan, he recorded impressions of counterculture as the country made an incredible recovery in the 1960s.

In 1955, DeCarava and his wife opened a gallery in the front part of their brownstone apartment on 85th Street called, A Photographer’s Gallery. Although the gallery was only open for two years, it helped pioneer an effort to win recognition for photography as a fine art. Because he felt very strongly about maintaining the artistic integrity of his images, he eventually gave up magazine and freelance work in order to take on a job teaching at Hunter College, where he’s been for over thirty years.

DeCarava was the first African American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been the subject of 15 solo exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art in 1996. And in 2006 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Instead of becoming a teacher as her mother wanted, she went uptown to the studio of a famous portrait photographer, Arnold Genthe, and asked him for a job. She was hired, and her life’s work began. She learned how to set up a camera and studio lights, met many rich and famous people, and studied the artistry with which Genthe portrayed people: he didn’t just snap their picture; he seemed to make the camera understand the people. This sense that an understanding of a subject was essential in making a portrait was truly the artistic part of photography, and something that Dorothea would take with her for the rest of her career. She worked with Genthe until she moved to San Francisco in 1918. The following year she opened a successful portrait studio.

Although she got her start and made most of her money taking portraits of wealthy people, Lange preferred the deeper challenge of photographing the real human condition. Wherever there was social upheaval, or quiet suffering, Lange was there with a compassionate eye to record and report. “I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit.” During the depression, the government created work for writers, scholars and artists through various documentary assignments, and Lange was fortunate to get such a position. She took pictures of the labor strikes in San Francisco, photographed out-of-work sharecroppers and their families in the deep South, and went up and down California, meeting and photographing the homeless families who had come in search of work. She would walk into camps, where homeless pea-pickers and refugees of the Oklahoma dust bowl were scraping by, sometimes starving to death, and talk to them until they felt comfortable enough to have their pictures taken. Dorothea thought that her limp, which she had since the age of seven due to polio, created an instant rapport between herself and her subjects. She said that people trusted her more because she didn’t appear “whole and secure” in the face of their poverty and insecurity.

In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. She died of cancer at the age of 70. In 1965, the last year of her life, Dorothea Lange was honored by a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

More images can be found at Getty, artnet and masters-of-fine-art-photography.com.

Levitt took her Leica to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, like Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side, where people treated their streets as their living rooms and street life was richly sociable and visually interesting. In order to capture moments unnoticed, she sometimes attached a device that fit on the Leica camera called a winkelsucher, which allowed her to look one way and shoot the photo the other.

Fortune magazine was the first to publish Levitt’s work, in its July 1939 issue on New York City. The following year, one of her photos was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department and in 1943 they gave Levitt her first solo show.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, Levitt published only a few books, among them A Way of Seeing (1965), In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-48 (1987); and Mexico City (1997), revisiting her one trip abroad. Recently, though, several volumes of her work have been published: Crosstown (2001); Here and There (2004), black-and-white work not previously published; Slide Show (2005), showcasing her color work; and Helen Levitt (2008).

Later, in addition to health problems, changes in neighborhood life also affected her work. “I go where there’s a lot of activity,” she said. “Children used to be outside. Now the streets are empty. People are indoors looking at television or something.” Helen Levitt died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan at 95 years old.

More of Helen Levitt’s work, including her color photos, can be seen and Lens Culture, Galerie f5,6 and Laurence Miller Gallery.

He had returned from a project shooting gypsies in Romania just two days before the Soviet invasion, in August 1968. He witnessed and recorded the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded Prague and crushed the Czech reforms. Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of Prague into the hands of the Magnum agency, and published anonymously in The Sunday Times Magazine under the initials P. P. (Prague Photographer) for fear of reprisal to him and his family.

His pictures of the events became dramatic international symbols. In 1969 the “anonymous Czech photographer” was awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs requiring exceptional courage. With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, he applied for a three-month working visa and fled to England in 1970, where he applied for political asylum, in 1971 joined Magnum Photos and stayed for more than a decade. A nomad at heart, he continued to wander around Europe with his camera and little else.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Koudelka sustained his work through numerous grants and awards, and continued to exhibit and publish major projects like Gypsies (1975, his first book) and Exils (1988, his second). Koudelka has had more than a dozen books of his work published, including most recently in 2006 the retrospective volume Koudelka.

Koudelka’s images of the Prague Invasion of 1968 and other photos can be see at Magnum.