Distinguished Photographers Award l www.womeninphotography.org

October - Decemberr 2003

WIPI Distinguished Photographers Award - Biographies

Women In Photography International Distinguished Photographers Award

International Photo Awards - December 7, 2003

Leibovitz, Annie (1949- ), American photographer, known for her portraits of celebrities, who range from political figures to musicians and athletes. Her work has included magazine, fashion, and advertising photography. Many of Leibovitz's portraits of rock music celebrities have become signature images. A notable example is her portrait of the nude John Lennon on a bed with his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono, the last portrait of Lennon before his death in 1980. Born in Westport, Connecticut, Leibovitz received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971. She subsequently continued her studies with photographer Ralph Gibson. In 1969 she lived on a kibbutz in Israel and participated in an archaeological dig at the site of King Solomon's temple. From 1970 to 1983 she was a freelance photographer and the chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, and in 1975 she served as a concert-tour photographer for The Rolling Stones band. She has been a contributing photographer for Vanity Fair magazine since 1983, and in the early 1990s she founded the Annie Leibovitz Studio in New York City.

Life is pretty strange anyway: Annie Leibovitz
in conversation with fotoTAPETA's Anna Beata Bohziewicz
http://fototapeta.art.pl/fti-ale.html
( Warsaw's Hotel Bristol, January 19, 1998 )

ABB: - Are you shy?

AL: - Oh! We are all shy. No one knows how to talk. Sometimes we sit in my studio and everywhere is very quiet and no one talks. It drives me crazy... There must be a reason why people who are photographers are not very good at verbal communication. I don't want to believe this, as I think we get lazy. We think because we are photographers we don't have to try to communicate. But I know from my own personal experience that it's hard to watch something to go on and then suddenly to be talking at the same time. read http://fototapeta.art.pl/fti-ale.html

see photos: previous page ©Waldemar Gorlewski \ Agencja Gazeta \ agencja@agora.pl website: http://agencja.gazeta.pl/fotoweb/

Lillian Bassman
book review by Carole Glauber WIPI Archive Archive 7 July 2001 - September 2001
Lillian Bassman, photographs by Lillian Bassman; Essay by Martin Harrison, A Bulfinch Press Book, Little, Brown and Company, 1997.

At the turn of the century, a schism existed between commercial photographers who earned a living making photographs, and the creative purity of the amateur artistic photographer. Many amateur photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, or Anne Brigman believed in aesthetic independence from the constraints of earning money from their photographs. After World War I, Steichen abandoned this divide by publishing artificially lighted cubist and art deco designed fashion photographs. read more

Annette Message
by Patrizia Di Bello, Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography
School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media Birkbeck College

Annette Messager was born in Berck sur Mer in France in 1943. In the 1960s she
briefly frequented the Ecole des Arts Dicoratifs (School of Decorative Arts) in
Paris, coming of age in an artistic and intellectual context characterised by a
general questioning of the cultural project of modernity and the artistic
hierarchies of modernism.

Messager uses photographs, found or taken by herself, together with a host of other
materials and techniques from embroidery to pastel-drawings and stuffed toys -
associated with a feminine, low status culture. Her works, often in the form of
installations, highlight the shifting yet rich status of photographs in our everyday
culture, at once emotionally and aesthetically charged, household clutter and
precious fetishistic objects.

She has exhibited in France and world-wide since the 1970s:

1974, Musie d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
1978, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York.
1980, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri.
1981, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, and PS1, New York.
1983, Musie des Beaux-Arts, Calais, France.
1985, Riverside Studios, London.
1987, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Art Space, Sydney.
1989, Musie de Grenoble, France.
1990, Galerie Crousel-Robelin BAMA, Paris.
1991, Mercer Union and Cold City Gallery, Toronto.
1992, Arnolfini, Bristol, Cornerhouse, Manchester, and Camden Art Centre, London.
1995 Musie d'Art Moderne de la Ville di Parigi, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
and Museum of Modern Art, New York (retrospective exhibition).
1997, Gagosian Gallery, New York, and Venice Biennale, Italy.
2002, Made in France: Art from 1945 to the Present , Washington University Gallery
of Art, Washington (group show).
2002-3, Moving Pictures , Guggenheim Museum, New York (group show).
2003-4, Yankee Remix , MassMoCA, North Adams, MA (With Huang Yong Ping).

Short Bibliography:

Annette Messager, Comidie Tragidie, 1971-1989 (Grenoble: Musie de Grenoble, 1989).

Annette Messager, Faire des Histoires / Making up Stories. With texts by Hurtig, A.
and Lamoureux, J (Toronto: Mercer Union and Cold City Gallery, 1991).

Annette Messager, Faire Parade, 1971-1995 (Paris: ARC Musie d Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris, 1995).

Annette Messager. With texts by Conketon. S. and Eliel C. (Los Angeles and New York:
County Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, 1995).

Annette Messager, by Grenier, C. (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).

Annette Messager at MoMA Web Site, a pilot project of The Museum of Modern Art, New
York, is a component of the exhibition Annette Messager. Link: http://moma.org/index.html

Patrizia Di Bello
Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography
School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media
Birkbeck College
P.dibello@bbk.ac.uk

others will follow as soon as we receive them. If you have written any bio's of any of the nominees, please submit to: Info@WomenInphotography.org