Tina Barney

 

Tina Barney, born in New York in 1945, was introduced to photography through her grandfather, who inspired her to collect photographic images as a young girl.  In the mid 1970s, Barney first began taking photographs, but it wasn’t until 1991 that her talents were recognized, becoming the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Barney’s mostly large-scale color photographs of people, places and events offer a private look into the lives of the leisure class, highlighting candid moments that capture the true essence of her subjects.  Barney was one of the first artists, in the 1980s, to explore the decorative role of making pictures.  Barney lives between Watch Hill, Rhode Island and New York.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

Tanyth Berkeley

 

Tanyth Berkeley’s portraits of women, inspired by painters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Hieronymus Bosch, non-traditionally capture the essence of true femininity.  Whether her subject is a dutiful housewife, transgender individual, or adolescent girl, Berkeley captures the most significant and underlying details of sexuality, sensuality, sophistication, and style.  Berkeley’s representation of women, photographed in everyday environments, captures qualities that redefine the traditional perception of beauty.  Berkeley lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Denver Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Columbus Museum of Art

 

James Casebere

 

As early as the mid-1970s, Michigan native James Casebere began constructing architectural models to photograph, capturing obvious voids with the use of dramatic lighting.  Casebere’s work, imagery of architecture in vacant spaces, prisons, corridors, tunnels, and other abandoned environments, showcases the unique qualities found in institutional and domestic architectural form.  Casebere resides in New York.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum, New York
National Gallery of Canada

 

Sophie Calle

 

Parisian born artist Sophie Calle is not only a photographer, but a writer, installation artist and conceptual artist.  Calle’s work, inspired by the 1960’s French literary movement known as Oulipo, depicts human vulnerability in examining identity and intimacy.  Almost in an “investigative” way, Calle seems to research the lives of her subjects.  Although much of her work tends toward the voyeuristic, Calle has put her own life on display, becoming a subject of her own photography.  From her home in Paris, France, Calle continues to document the lives of those around her, consciously concealing the boundaries between art and life. 

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston
Tate Gallery, London
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art

 

Rineke Dijkstra

 

Born in Sittard, the Netherlands, Rineke Dijkstra studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.  In the late 1980s Dijkstra worked regularly as a portrait photographer, hired by magazines and corporations.  Throughout the 1990s, her style was defined through imagery of adolescents, clubbers, soldiers, and individuals of other various groups generally standing, facing the camera.  Most notable are her well-known beach portraits, which feature one or more adolescents against a seascape.  Dijkstra lives in Amsterdam.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Sprengel Museum, Hannover
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
The Art Institute of Chicago
International Center of Photography, New York

 

Candida Höfer

 

Daughter of German journalist Werner Höfer, Candida Höfer’s photographs reveal her interest in documenting collections of similar things.  For over twenty years, Höfer, a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, has created a systematic visual study of details within public spaces such as office interiors, zoos, museums and theaters.  Höfer’s images, often absent of people, create patterns of sense and orderliness, often emphasizing the ironic by drawing the viewer’s eye to things slightly askew.  Höfer currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

 

Nicholas Nixon

 

Best known for the ongoing portrait series of his wife and her sisters, Nicholas Nixon addresses many traditional themes in his documentary style photography.  From family life to the elderly and infirm, Nixon captures the essential qualities of expressions and tonalities of the people he photographs.  Nixon is the recipient of two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships, as well as three National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowships.  Nixon resides in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

The Art Institute of Chicago
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Cleveland Museum of Art
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Catherine Opie

 

Specializing in the portraiture of transgendered people and GLBTQ couples reminiscent of Hans Holbein, Catherine Opie has begun to focus on photographing landscapes, cityscapes and oceanscapes, both rural and remote.  A professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, Opie’s work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.  Opie lives and works in Los Angeles.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Museum of Fine Art, Boston
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

 

Laurie Simmons

 

Laurie Simmons’ work began when she was a freelance photographer, employed by a dollhouse miniature company.  She would continue creating compositions using paper dolls, puppets and ventriloquist dummies, composing moods within the make-believe worlds through the use of lighting and composition.  Simmons’ work blends psychological, political and conceptual approaches to art making whimsical, absurd, and often disquieting critiques of the medium.  Simmons is the recipient of several awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.  Simmons lives in New York.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Baltimore Museum of Art
San Jose Museum of Art, California
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

 

Lorna Simpson

 

Lorna Simpson first became well-known in the 1980s for her large format photograph-and-text works that challenged narrow and conventional views of gender, identity, culture, and history.  Simpson uses figures, most often African-American women, to examine the ways in which our lives and experiences are shaped in a multi-racial American culture.  Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Simpson has begun to work in film and video.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, Chicago
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

 

Massimo Vitali

 

After studying photography in London, in the 1960s Massimo Vitali embarked on a career as a photojournalist for various Italian and European magazines.  In the 1980s, Vitali worked as a filmmaker for television and cinema and from the mid-1990s onward, he turned his attention to photography as a means for artistic research and as a tool for portraying scenes of the world.  His works, mostly large-scale, are divided by subject matter and chromatic domination.  Vitali lives in Lucca, Italy.

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Guggenheim Museum, New York
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver
Centre Georges Pompidou – Musée national d’Art Moderne, Paris
Tate Modern, London

 

James Welling

 

As a teenager, James Welling frequented museums and galleries during trips to New York with his parents, fostering his passion for art.  In 1971, while attending Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Welling transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.  There he studied with luminaries such as Michael Asher, Dan Graham, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and John Baldessari, for whom he worked as a teaching assistant.  Welling has continued to work simultaneously in video, paint and photography since the 1970s.  In 1995, he moved to Los Angeles to head the photography area at the Department of Art at UCLA.  In 1999, Welling was awarded the DG k Forder Prize in Photography for his 1998 photographic series “New Abstractions.”

 

Selected Collections and Exhibitions

 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis