WEST GERMANY. Rhineland-Westphalia. Ruhrgebiet region.

Erich Lessing was a renowned documentary photographer born in Vienna in 1923. Lessing used his photographs to document many significant political and social events, including the reconstruction of Germany after the war and the dramatic events of the Hungarian Revolution. In addition to this, he spent most of his later career working around the world with different companies and has had photographs published in renowned magazines including LIFE, Paris Match, Epoca, Picture Post, and Quick. I really enjoy his style of photography as he documents natural images of friends, family, and landscapes at different events in a variety of locations. From doing this, he indirectly portrays a sense of place from photographing in a variety of locations and documenting cultural events. This is similar to the style of photography I want to explore throughout my project as I want to produce a range of images which represent what ‘Sense of Place’ means to me. I intend to do this in a similar way to Erich Lessing however I am going to take images of landscapes and environments in places which are important to me.

Copyright – Erich Lessing @ Magnum Photos.

Giant mural of Lenin in front of the Park for Industry and Science.

Burt Glinn was a freelance photographer who was born in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia in the 1920s. During his life before his freelance photography career, he served in the US Army, studied literature at Harvard University and worked for Life Magazine. Glinn became an established member of Magnum in the early 1950s with his first publications being a colour series of the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. By the late 1950s, he was awarded the Matthew Brandy Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri. Alongside this, he has received numerous awards for his editorial and commercial photography, including the Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad from the Overseas Press Club and the Best Print Ad of the Year from the Art Directors Club of New York. Glinn has served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. I really like how Burt Glinn takes his photographs as they seem natural and unplanned, I will use this idea to generate my own inspiration for my project. I am going to work similarly to this when taking photographs for my project as I want to represent my sense of place through a series of photographs of places which are meaningful to me in the area I grew up.

Copyright – Burt Glinn @ Magnum Photos.

USA. Illinois. Chicago. 1946. Storefront.

Wayne Miller was born in 1918 in Chicago, before perusing his career in photography he studied banking at the University of Illinois and worked part-time as a photographer. Miller also studied photography at the Art Centre School of Los Angeles in 1941, and in 1946 he won two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowship awards. In his later life, Miller taught photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago, then in 1949 moved to Orinda and worked for Life Magazine. He became a member of Magnum Photos in 1958, and was named as its president from 1962 to 1966, throughout this period he inspired to ‘photograph mankind and explain man to man’. After he retired from professional photography in 1975 he spent his time working to protect California’s forests. Prior to this, Miller co-authored ‘A Baby’s First Year’ with Dr Benjamin Spock and published his own book ‘The World is Young’. I am going to take inspiration from the way Wayne Miller works as he effectively takes images of the natural world in a fascinating way, this is what I am going to do for my ‘Sense of Place’ project. However, to make this unique to me I will photograph places of meaning to me which reflect my sense of place.

Copyright – Wayne Miller @ Magnum Photos.

1981.

Alex Webb is an American born photographer who is best known for his vibrant and unique colour work, especially his images from Latin America and the Caribbean. Throughout his career, he has published and produced 16 photography books, his most famous one – The Suffering of Light. This is a survey book of over 30 years of his colour photographs, and more recently, Memory City, a meditation about film, time, and the city of Rochester in New York. Webb has also had his exhibited at many museums worldwide, these including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts. To do this day, his work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. Alex became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1979. I am going to take inspiration from Alex Webb as his photographs portray similar themes and ideas to how I want to photograph my ‘Sense of Place’. In addition to this, I really enjoy how he captures landscape images and uses his unique techniques to make his work more diverse and interesting.

Copyright – Alex Webb @ Magnum Photos.