The following events occurred this month in the History of Photography:
Annie Leibovitz was born on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1968, she went to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. There she discovered photography and was seduced by the immediacy of the medium. In 1973, she became Rolling Stone’s chief photographer and it’s been said that her work helped to define the look and style of the magazine. In 1983, she joined Vanity Fair and created some of the most memorable covers for the magazine. In 1991, her work was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York and according to William Hartshorn, then Deputy Director of the ICP, this exhibition was designated as one of the most popular in the history of the venue. Many of her images have been called icons of our time, including the photograph she took of John Lennon and Yoko Ono for the cover of Rolling Stone and the controversial image of Demi Moore for the cover of Vanity Fair.
Stephen Shore was born on October 8, 1947. When he was six years old an uncle gave him a Kodak darkroom set and that initiated him into photography. At nine, he got his first 35mm camera and by the time he was 11 years old he was convinced that he would be a photographer. In the 1960s, he met Andy Warhol when Shore was only 17 years old. Shore has said that meeting Andy Warhol was a turning point in his life and surely marked some of the photographer’s aesthetic interests. By 1971, he had exhibited his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York becoming the youngest living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the MET.
Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California. 1936.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540
Dorothea Lange died on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, California, at age 70. When Lange’s doctors told her she only had months to live, the photographer was still thinking about photographing her family to make a documentary about the Farm Security Administration photographs and to document the unionization of migrants workers in California. None of those projects would be completed. The last project she was involved with was a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lange and John Szarkowsi, head of the Museum’s Department of Photography, collaborated closely on the decisions of content and the organization of the photographs. The exhibition opened in January 15, 1966, after the death of the photographer.
On October 27, 1972, LIFE magazine published a photograph of Edwin Land where he demonstrates his new invention, the SX-70. A camera that could be folded down to the size if a cigar case and could fit in a coat pocket. The magazine titled the piece, “A Genius and his Magic Camera” and it shows Land surrounded by children holding the SX-70 model. This camera was the first automated, motorized, folding, single lens reflex camera to produce self-developing instant color prints. By 1973, the SX-70 model was sold at the rate of five thousand a day.
