William Albert Allard

“I think I can feel color. I can’t explain it, but I can feel it. In my photography, color and
composition are inseparable. I see in color.” —William Albert Allard

“Call Allard’s photographs wonderful performances. They gain in our esteem–given their particularity, their luminance, the high finish they give to human existance–if we think of them not as facts but as art, made things, opinions, as brightly informative and indispensable mediators between the world and we who would see it, like it, live in it more fully”, wrote Richard Ford in his forward to Allard’s book Portraits of America.

William Albert Allard’s subjects address the camera with surprising openness in photographs that have been a staple of National Geographic— where he has produced over 30 articles since 1964. Equal parts colorist, storyteller, and ethnographer, his down-to-earth manner, fierce integrity, and the consistent brilliance of his essays have made him a romantic model for a generation of American photographers.

Allard has published five highly acclaimed books; Vanishing Breed, photographs and writing about cowboys and the West was nominated for The American Book Award and received the Leica Medal of Excellence for Outstanding Achievement.

Allard’s prints appear in many private and museum collections and have been published in most major U.S. and European publications. He has photographed in 25 countries on topics as diverse as rodeos, urban elephants, and India’s untouchables.

William Albert Allard’s LOOK3 exhibit at Les Yeux du Monde: Five Decades

 

Sally Mann

“I want my work to be about the people and places that I love, in all their complexity…and the hope is that it will have a universal resonance in spite of being so personal. To that end, I’m not afraid to use lyricism, romance and intimacy which, like venom to the snake-handlers, offer terrible risk but also a ticket to transcendence.” – Sally Mann

“Few photographers of any time or place have matched Sally Mann’s steadiness of simple eyesight, her serene technical brilliance and the clearly communicated eloquence she derives from her subjects, human and otherwise-subjects observed with an ardor that is all but indistinguishable from love.” –Reynolds Price, in Time magazine.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia, where she was born in 1951.

One of America’s most renowned photographers, she has exhibited work around the world and was designated “America’s Best Photographer” in 2001 by Time magazine.

Mann has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Century Award from the Museum of Photographic Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is housed in numerous public and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and The National Museum of Modern Art, in Tokyo.

In 2002, two documentaries about her work aired on PBS; a feature length film, “What Remains”, debuted at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and will air on HBO in 2007. “What Remains” will also be shown Saturday June 9 at Charlottesville’s Vinegar Hill Theater with a Q&A session with Sally Mann to follow.

She has published seven monographs, among them Immediate Family, a series of startlingly intimate images of her three children, and Deep South, a compilation of her haunting and otherworldly landscape imagery.

She works almost exclusively in large format, most recently employing the wet-plate collodion process, which will be on display at her exhibit at Second Street Gallery.

Sally Mann’s LOOK3 exhibit at Second Street Gallery: The Given: Studio Work by Sally Mann

 

Eugene Richards

“There are 91 boxes of photographs up there on the floor to ceiling shelves: photographs that have me wanting to return places; photographs that might make some people uncomfortable. “ —Eugene Richards

In the New York Times Magazine, Richard Woodward wrote about Richards’ unique relationship with his subjects: “The obvious trust that [his] subjects place in him explains in part his ability to view their lives from the inside–from their beds and bathrooms, as though he were a guest at the kitchen table or a member of the family.”

Photography’s most single-minded social documentarist, Eugene Richards, aims for immediate, intimate, unflinching access to victimized individuals.

Richards is best known for his books – he has authored thirteen – and photo essays on such diverse topics as breast cancer, drug addiction, poverty, emergency medicine, pediatric HIV and AIDS, the meat packing industry, the plight of the world’s mentally disabled, and aging and death in America.

Among numerous honors, he has won the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Olivier Rebbot Award twice, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award for coverage of the disadvantaged.

Eugene Richards’s LOOK3 exhibit at McGuffey Art Center: 13 Books