Photograph 1

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens. He died in 1989 at the young age of 42. Mapplethorpe went to college at Pratt Institute where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpting. He first got into photography in 1970 when he was given his first Polaroid camera. He used those photos in collages that he liked to make. Five years later he got a Hasselblad medium format camera which he used to begin taking pictures of his friends and acquaintances. He also used it to work on commercial projects, cover art for albums, and pictures for  Interview  Magazine. Mapplethorpe produced photos that both challenged and adhered to the classical aesthetic standards throughout the 1980s. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986. However, this did not stop him, instead, it gave him a reason to work harder. He accelerated his creative efforts, widened his scope of photographic inquiry, and accepted increasingly challenging commissions. Just a year before his death the Whitney Museum of American...

       Arnold Newman was born on March 3, 1918 in New York City, and died on June 6, 2006, in New York City. He was 88 years old when he died. Arnold Newman was known as the “Father of Environmental Portraiture.”, and he was one of the great masters of the 20th and 21st century. He was also known for his still life and abstract photography.           I am not a big fan of portrait photography because I don’t think people have the same raw beauty as the environment. We trust photos to tell us a story and while the environment can never lie in a photo, people almost always lie in their photos. Portrait photography is all about posing/staging the person and the things around them and I don’t like that. I also tend not to like people so I personally don’t like to photograph them. However, Arnold Newman’s work as a portrait photographer brings the abstract and nature into the picture which makes his work nicer. He is not my f...