People in the News

Jesse Alexander, a celebrated motor-sports photographer from Santa Barbara, Calif., was given the Star Driver award by Mercedes-Benz this summer for his artistic contributions to the automobile industry.
Alexander’s most famous work includes his images from the 1954 French Grand Prix in Reims and inaugural images of the Maseratt 4.5 coupe rolling off the line at the Maserati factory in 1958.

Tacoma, Wash.-based photographer Gene Eckhart’s photo project, “Mountain Gorillas . . . and People: Understanding the Connections and Why They Matter,” has been accepted for support by Seattle’s Blue Earth Alliance foundation. The project is designed to promote mountain gorilla conservation worldwide and influence policy in a meaningful way.

Endangered Amazon River dolphins, known in Brazil as botos, were the unusual subjects featured in the July 2009 issue of National Geographic. This image, shot by Kevin Schafer, shows how this normally gray-colored species appears orange in the tea-colored river water. Copyright © Kevin Schafer

Kevin Schafer, a Seattle-based nature photographer, was featured in the July 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine for his photographs of Amazon River dolphins. One of Schafer’s unpublished dolphin portraits also won the top prize in the mammal behavior category at the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. His work has been published in Smithsonian, Natural History and National Wildlife magazines.

Seattle photographer Natalie Fobes, known for her work in National Geographic, Audubon and Smithsonian, is scheduled to give her third presentation at a Wedding & Portrait Photographers International conference, this one in Las Vegas in March 2010.
Fobes’ lecture, titled “Putting Landscape into Portraiture,” will elucidate how to best use light and position to configure landscape scenes with people.

After seven years, photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, of Venice, Calif., has decided to leave the VII photo agency to work at a multi-platform management and production company run by her husband, Frank Evers.
The new company, Institute for Artist Management, launched in beta form in September and eventually will have offices in Los Angeles, New York, London and Milan.

Seattle-based Jeffry W. Myers, known for his ability to capture the mystic and magical elements found in nature, has published a new book, “Mystery and Meaning in Our Universe.” The book is composed of nature photography from the Washington, Oregon and California coasts as well as from the southwestern United States.

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has selected five portraits by renowned photographer Al Satterwhite to become part of its permanent collection.
The collection is made up of portraits of individuals who throughout history have made an impression on American culture. Satterwhite’s selected portraits are of baseball legend Henry “Hank” Aaron; Willie Shoemaker, the first jockey in history to win more than $100 million; auto racing legends Mario Andretti and Richard Petty; and professional tennis icon Chris Evert.

Gary Voth’s photo of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett speaking at the 2005 Microsoft CEO Summit was published in Fortune. Here is another image from the same event. Copyright © Gary Voth

Larry Sultan, a prominent photographer and teacher in the Bay Area art community, has been chosen as the next artist trustee on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s board of trustees. Sultan, only the second person to be appointed to this role, will be responsible for supporting the museum’s director and helping to expand the museum’s artistic community.
One of Sultan’s most notable projects is his documentary of the adult film industry in the California area. He was awarded the SFMOMA Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005.

A photograph of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett taken by Sammamish, Wash.-based Gary Voth was featured in Fortune magazine’s June 2009 story on retirement. The image was shot when Gates and Buffett attended the Microsoft CEO Summit in 2005.
Voth’s recent work, shot in the Pacific Northwest, Tokyo and Alaska, spotlights the people and faces of each region.

SPECIAL HONORS

Louie Psihoyos of Boulder, Colo., the photographer featured on the cover of PhotoMedia’s Spring 2006 issue, has received numerous awards for his recent film “The Cove,” including the 2009 Seattle International Film Festival’s Golden Space Needle Audience Award, the 2009 Sundance Festival’s Audience Award for Best Documentary and the 2009 Sydney Film Festival Audience Award.
Psihoyos’ movie follows activists as they attempt to infiltrate a highly guarded cove in Taiji, Japan, where more than 20,000 dolphins a year are caught and either sold to aquariums or slaughtered and fed to Japanese schoolchildren. The film also shows how the dolphin meat has accumulated dangerously high levels of mercury.

PASSAGES

Willy Ronis, 1910 €“2009
French photographer Willy Ronis, known for his humanistic photographs of postwar France, died of natural causes at age 99 this September in Paris.
Influenced by black-and-white photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams, Ronis portrayed scenes of the common worker, factory strikes and everyday Parisian street life.
A native Parisian, Ronis was born in 1910 to a father who ran a photography studio and a mother who taught piano. Young Willy developed an interest in his father’s studio as a teenager and, at the age of 22, took over the family business after his father became ill from cancer.
In 1936 Willy Ronis began freelancing for the Rapho agency, which is now part of the French photo agency Eyedea. He was later published in Life and Vogue magazines. Ronis received many awards throughout his career, including the Kodak prize in 1947, the Gold Medal at the Venice Biennale in 1957 and the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres for photography in 1979 from the French Ministry of Culture.
Along with colleagues Robert Doisneau, Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ronis became part of the Groupe des XV, a faction of 15 revolutionary writers and artists who dedicated themselves to promoting photography as a true form of artistic expression.
Ronis was awarded the Lucie Lifetime Achievement award in 2006, and was also named an Officer in France’s prestigious National Order of Merit and a Commander of Arts and Letters.
Ronis’ archive will be donated to the French state, an arrangement that he established in 1983.

Julius Shulman,  1910 €“2009
Julius Shulman, the architectural photographer known for his commercial images of modernist buildings in California, died of natural causes on July 15 in Los Angeles. He was 98.
Born on a farm in Connecticut, Shulman only dabbled in photography until he was 25, when he began taking pictures of buildings for architect Richard Neutra.
Through Neutra, Shulman met and worked for other industry architects, such as Raphael Soriano, Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Aim, J.R. Davidson, Charles Eames, Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Noted for saying that the secret to his success was his ability “to look into the house, X-ray-style, from the outdoors,” Shulman’s images often featured not just the buildings but also the environments and people surrounding them.
Shulman worked until 1990, when he retired from photography and focused on print sales instead. In 1998 he published “Julius Shulman: Architecture and Photography,” in which he defined an architecture photographer’s role: “To present the results of an architect’s design efforts to the world.”
In retirement, Shulman also collaborated with photographer Juergen Nogai to publish “Malibu: A Century of Living by the Sea.”
Over the course of his career, Shulman created more than 260,000 prints, negatives, transparencies and other images documenting over 7,000 architectural projects. The J. Paul Getty Museum acquired Shulman’s archive in 2005.
Shulman’s first wife, Emma, died in 1973, and his second, Olga, died in 1999. He is survived by his daughter and grandson.