03.02.11
The 20 Bad Girls of Photography
The history of photography is filled with photographers who have broken the accepted rules and in our August issue we compiled a list of the bad boys who we thought deserved recognition for their exploits. Due to popular demand and to recognise the female photographers who have travelled the same road, we have compiled a list of bad girls. Without these photographers, our profession would be a safe, dull and sterile place obsessed with ‘correct technique’. Thanks to them photography has remained an art form which continually challenges and questions. We decided to say thanks to our favourite bad girls, who have rebelled against the bland in both their lives and their work, by bringing them together for the first time ever. As always, if you think you know better and believe we’ve missed someone out, please let us know at feedback@professionalphotographer.co.uk
NAN GOLDIN (1953 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Creates intimate portraits that are lasting memories of the sex, drug use and violence that has shadowed her life and that of her inner circle..
Goldin’s intimate pictures often show herself, her lovers and friends, which she sees as her extended family, engaged in sexual acts or taking hard drugs; sometimes they chart the aftermath of violent acts, such as the domestic violence she endured at the hand of a boyfriend, or an exploration of her sister’s suicide.
Born in Washington DC, she picked up a camera aged 15 and had her first solo show in Boston, depicting the city’s gay community. Moving to New York in the late 1970s, Goldin – already a heroin user – inhabited the city’s gay neighborhoods, notably The Bowery, where she captured the lives of hard-drug users, drag queens and homosexuals, people introduced to her by the photographer David Armstrong. Many of her subjects became close friends. Her project The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was begun at this time but continues to be a movable feast, constantly edited and updated with new images. Taking the form of a slideshow, it chronicles the lives of Goldin, her lovers and friends and catalogues the sex, drugs and violence – and ultimately the loss – that have defined their lives. With a naturalistic approach, she began shooting colour when she accidentally loaded colour film into her camera. She often shoots only in available light. Her images, while shocking in their themes, always display tenderness. She has said that unless it was for a commercial shoot, she couldn’t imagine taking portraits of people she didn’t know. Having lost many of the friends whom she captured in her early images, she spends her time between New York and Paris.
Lee Miller (1907 - 1977)
Bad Girl credentials:
A muse to Man Ray, ravishing beauty and survivor who reinvented herself several times over, she was fearless as a war photographer.
Born in Poughkeepsie in New York, Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller had an unconventional childhood. She would pose provocatively with her friends for her amateur-photographer father from an early age and was raped by a family friend at just seven years old. Stunningly beautiful, her modelling career was launched when she was discovered by Condé Montrose Nast, founder of Vogue, in the street in New York. She was photographed by the great photographers of the day and a commercial image of Miller by Edward Steichen advertising women’s sanitary products caused a scandal. Independent and intrepid, Miller ditched modelling at the age of 22 and moved to Paris with the intention of studying with surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Despite his assertion that he did not take students, Miller succeeded in changing his mind, becoming his lover and muse. In 1939 she began freelancing furiously for Vogue and in 1944 became a correspondent for the US army. One of the very few women combat photographers of her time, Miller recorded the liberation of Paris, the first use of napalm, in St-Malo, France, and followed the troops into the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. She was to pay the price for showing the world the terrors of the Nazi regime, suffering lengthy depression on her return from the war. She was married twice, became a member of the British upper class (by her second marriage, to the Surrealist painter Sir Roland Penrose), and transformed from muse to acclaimed Surrealist and photographer. The image of Miller taking a soak in Hitler’s bath while billeted at his abandoned apartment in 1945 was criticised by some but, according to her son, the act gave her a sense of victory over evil. In the image we can see Miller’s boots, which she had worn that same day as she walked through Dachau. www.leemiller.co.uk
Lillian Bassman (1917 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Shot for Harper’s Bazaar over three decades. She discarded a life’s work when her images fell out of style.
Bassman grew up in a free-thinking Jewish family in Brooklyn. After studying with legendary Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, she shot for the magazine from the 1940s to the 1960s, creating glamorous black and white fashion images through darkroom techniques. With strong shapes and high-contrast, her images are iconic. When her work fell out of fashion in the 1970s, she turned her back on fashion photography, trashing a life time’s work. A bag of Bassman’s negatives was discovered in the 1990s and her work began to be appreciated once again.
Vee Speers (1962 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Creates chilling portraits of children.
Australian-born, Paris-dwelling Speers draws from her experience in editorial, fashion and fine art photography to present beguiling yet unsettling imagery. Her 2005 book Bordello, which featured women shot in former brothels that were still highly decorated, harked back to 1920s and 1930s, red light Paris of Brassaï. Capturing the sumptuous sensuality of the surroundings as well as the women themselves, Speers created beautiful portraits. No less wondrous but rather more disturbing, Speers’s work The Birthday Party creates an uneasy look at childhood through a series of portraits of children supposedly dressed up for a special occasion. Inspired by her own daughter’s fancy dress party, Speers wants the viewer to view the pictures – a girl with the longest plait in school hiding a huge pair of scissors behind her back, a bare-chested boy dressed in combat pants brandishing a machine gun to his chest – think about their own childhood and decide what the images mean. Each child stares unsmiling and uncompromisingly and the camera, turning the notion of traditional children’s portraiture on its head. Speers says the images do not necessarily spring from a dark place and offers innocuous interpretations for some, based on her own childhood, but ultimately it is the viewer who decides the meaning, good or bad. www.veespeers.com
Lauren Greenfield (1966- present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Examines how the American ideals of success and beauty affect young women.
With Greenfield describing the basis of her work as concern for the human condition, she examines how seemingly trivial shifts in popular culture, such as Britney Spears donning a revealing top while dressed as a schoolgirl, have a profound effect on the attitudes of America’s youth. Her first project, Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood, was to be the first in a body of work that examines the effects of popular culture on the young. This was followed by Girl Culture, which took a critical look at self-esteem issues among young American women and THIN, an intimate study of the lives of 19 patients of a weight-disorder clinic in Florida. In Girl Culture a 14-year-old pushes together her barely-there breasts to create cleavage in front of the mirror in a department store dressing room, while in THIN a former model lifts her top to reveal self-inflicted scars that she did in order to “damage the property” as a reaction to her experience of the modelling world. Although Greenfield looks at subjects that are frequently discussed in the media, it is her intimate and unflinching study of the individuals at the heart of the issues rather than issues themselves that makes them compelling and thought- provoking. www.laurengreenfield.com
Louise Dahl-wolfe (1895-1989)
Bad Girl credentials:
Dahl Wolfe helped create the concept of ‘Envionmental’ fashion photography.
Born in San Francisco to Norwegian immigrant parents. Dahl Wolfe set up a photographic studio in 1933 where she remained until 1960 creating advertising and fashion for all of the major American fashion brands of the time. But it was her work with the legendary fashion Editor Diana Vreeland and art director Alexey Brodovitch as the staff photographer for Harpers Bazaar from that she changed the way in which fashion photography was created whilst blazing a trail for female fashion photographers within commercial photography. Dahl- Wolfes diminutive stature and heavy rimmed glasses marked her out as a unique proposition in the world of both editorial and advertising photography but it didn’t stop her work appearing in magazines as varied as Vogue to Sports Illustrated. http://nmwa.org/collection/portfolio.asp?LinkID=174&PageNo=1&CurrPage=1
Sally Mann (1951 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Accused of exploiting her own children for her work. Her images have been likened by some to child pornography.
Born in Virginia in 1951, Mann was self-taught and her only brush with a formal photographic education was an Ansel Adams workshop that she described as “more about going up to Yosemite and drinking wine.” Her first image was of a high-school classmate in the nude and after graduating from university she got a job as a staff photographer at Washington and Lee University. By the time of her second personal project At twelve: Portraits of young women, Mann was attracting attention for the uneasy mix of sexuality and innocence in her images of young girls on the cusp of adulthood. It was her third book, Immediate family, published in 1992, which brought Mann the greatest fame as well as criticism. The 65 images of her young children shot in the nude at the family’s summer house run the spectrum from innocence and playfulness to insecurity, sexuality and pain. Some of the publishing world’s most radical magazines refused to publish the work and the Wall Street Journal ran a picture of Mann’s naked four-year-old daughter with black bars across her eyes, chest and genitals. Another picture depicting her other daughter with a black eye was widely criticised and led to accusations that she was putting her art before her children. For her 2009 book, Proud Flesh, Mann turned the lens on her nearest and dearest again, documenting the effects of the wasting disease muscular dystrophy, on her husband Larry.
Ellen Von Unworth (1954 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
The mistress of erotic femininity in fashion photography who has led the way in fun, sexy images featuring female models at their most sexually playfull to sell products.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany Unwerth started out on the other side of the camera working as a fashion model for over ten years. Having decided to become a photographer she decided to create images which reflected the fun she had experienced as a model utilizing hyper colour cross process images to do this. The set of images which first got her noticed where of a young Claudia Schiffer for Guess? Jeans. Her work since then has been published in magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, The Face, Arena, L'Uomo Vogue and I-D, and she has published several books of of her work, both collections and personal projects and is often influenced by the sexual decadance of Germany during the Weimar Republic in the late twenties. All without compromising her original vision and premise. www.artandcommerce.com
Tina Modotti (1896 - 1942)
Bad Girl credentials:
Actress, photographer and revolutionary. She counted Edward Weston and several communist politicians as her lovers and was deported from Mexico for her political beliefs.
Born in Italy in 1896, Modotti moved to San Francisco at 16 where she became a silent film actress and artists’ model. Bohemian and free thinking, Modotti moved to Los Angeles to develop her acting career and fell into a boho circle that included photographer Edward Weston, becoming one of his models. Modotti and Weston quickly became lovers and under his guidance she developed a romantic photographic style. In 1923, Weston left his wife and family to move with Modotti to Mexico, where she ran his studio as he, in return, became her mentor. It was in Mexico that her political sensibilities were awakened as she got embroiled in a growing political dissent that included avant-garde artists and mural painters, whose work she documented. At this time, her photography shifted to reflect an interest in people, seen in her depictions of peasants and workers. After joining the Mexican Communist Party in 1927 her photography became ever more politicised and her activism began to attract the suspicion of the authorities. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she gave up her photography and continued to be active in Communist politics in the Soviet Union and Spain. Although her death in 1942 – after returning secretly to Mexico – was revealed to be as a result of natural causes, many presumed there was more to her demise.
Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981)
Bad Girl credentials:
She created intimate soft focus self portraits reflecting her fragile mental state and ended her own life aged only 22.
Best known for her black and white images featuring herself and her female friends, American born Woodmans images show young nude women, blurred by camera movement and long exposures, merging with their surroundings, or with their faces obscured. Woodman began to study photography at high school and moved to New York in 1979. After spending summer 1979 in Washington, she returned to New York "to make a career in photography" . Whilst there she sent portfolios of her work to fashion photographers for advice and the chance to assist but with little response and with a failed personal relationship in late 1980 she became depressed and on January 19, 1981, she committed suicide by jumping out of a loft window. Only around 120 of Woodmans images have ever been published or exhibited and many are untitled and are known only by a location and date. Yet despite her young age and limited archive of work her images have been embraced by the photography art world since her death for their raw sensitivity and reflection of her inner demons. Her work is now widely recognised as being a visual document of growing mental illness with many of the figures featured in the images beleived to be representations of how she felt about her own life. Although her work now hangs on gallery walls the intensity of her sadness is clear for all to see. www.victoria-miro.com
Bettina Rheims (1952 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Offended religious groups by shooting scenes from the Bible in modern-day settings and portraying Christ as a woman. Had a collection of explicit portraits of a Russian oligarch’s wife hailed as a work of art.
A former model, gallery owner and journalist, French-born Rheims took up photography at the age of 28 and became a full-time photographer two years later, quickly gaining work in fashion and celebrity photography. From her early days shooting strippers for French magazine Egoïste, many of her projects have explored the nature of the female form, often with her subjects nude and in highly provocative poses. Although she photographs celebrities, she often seeks out unknowns as her subjects, approaching them and asking if they are willing to pose nude for her. She says she doesn’t like to photograph anyone she knows. In 1998 she co-published the controversial book INRI, which drew criticism from religious groups in France for depicting Jesus and other biblical figures in modern-day scenarios. The book’s cover portrayed a bare-breasted young woman in a loincloth imitating the pose of Christ on the cross. In 2008 Rheims accepted a private commission to photograph Olga Rodionova, the wife ofa Russian oligarch. This is one of several similar commissions she has under taken in Russia over the past few years, a country where, she says, “you can go much further with your fantasies.” With the encouragement of Rheims, the one-off commission became a continuing, increasingly more explicit project, with many images verging on the pornographic. The resulting project was published by Taschen under the title The Book of Olga and was lauded by French critics as a work of art. www.bettina-rheims.com
Sylvia Plachy (1943 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Plachy continues to carry the flag for Hungarian street photography, channeling the spirit of Andre Kertesz whilst roaming the streets of New York. Tom Waits wrote music to accompany her images
Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary to a Jewish mother who was in hiding in fear of Nazi persecution during World War II. Her father was an aristrocratic hungarian roman catholic and Plachy's family moved to New York City due to the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 (ck). In New york she met fellow Hungarian immigrant photographer Andre Kertesz. From that point on she became a disciple of his way of work which has seen her become recognized as one of the last remaining photographers inspired and part of a golden age of street photography. Plachy's photo essays and portraits have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice and The New Yorker and she has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Paris and Tokyo. Her books have major awards such as the Golden Light Award for best book in 2004, the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography for best publication in 1991. Despite her ramshckle approach to cameras and kit Plachy has also been honored with a pestigous Guggenheim Fellowship and was Richard Avedons favourite photographer, with Avedon writing the forward to her break through book ‘Unguided Journey’ featuring her images from The Village Voice. Sylvia Plachy is also the mother of Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody. www.sylviaplachy.com
Dorothea Lange (1895 - 1965)
Bad Girl credentials:
Left a settled life to capture the movement of migrant workers during the Great Depression. Her images documenting the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War were banned.
Perhaps it was two distressing childhood experiences – contracting polio at the age of seven and being abandoned by her father at 12 – that helped to toughen Lange in preparation for a career that saw her travel to the dust bowls of Depression-era America at a time when most women were expected to stay at home. Of her experience of polio Lange said: “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.” It left her with a permanent limp and weakened right leg. Born in New Jersey, after studying photography in New York Lange moved to San Francisco where she was apprenticed to the renowned Arnold Genthe. She set up a studio, married and had two children, before the advent of the Great Depression gave her a reason to take her camera out on to the street to document the effects of the downturn. Divorcing her husband, Lange became politicised, took a job at the Resettlement Administration and with her second husband, an economist, began documenting the plight of displaced farm workers who were heading west in the hope of work. Her most famous image, Migrant Mother, remains the defining portrait of the human suffering caused by America’s Great Depression. During the Second World War, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she covered the controversial internment of Japanese-Americans in the US. Her images were seen as critical of the policy and confiscated by the US Army. Lange co-founded Aperture magazine and continued to shoot photodocumentary around the world. In later years she suffered post-polio syndrome. Fearless, tough and pioneering in an era when married women were expected to stay in the home, Lange said:?“I realise more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.”
Susan Meiselas (1948 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Unflinching in the face of sex and violence, Meiselas immerses herself in hidden and confrontational worlds for her work.
For her first major project, Carnival Strippers, published in 1972, Meiselas spent three years following travelling strip shows around the small country towns of New England during her summer holidays while teaching photography in New York’s public (state) schools. Throwing the spotlight on an aspect of society that had been safely hidden from general view was a theme she has revisited throughout her career. In 1976 she joined the male-dominated Magnum agency to which she still belongs. Some of her most memorable work dates from the late 1970s when her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua captured the fall of the Somoza dictatorship and the ensuing violence and drama. Her 1995 project Pandora’s Box, which entered the world of a Manhattan S&M club, is also highly acclaimed. Throughout her career, Meiselas has, with conviction and courage, shed light on a darker side of humanity that most prefer to overlook. www.susanmeiselas.com
Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971)
Bad Girl credentials:
Born into a wealthy New York family, she was drawn instead to those on the fringes of society, choosing them as her subjects. Shot transvestites, giants, dwarfs and some very unsettling children.
The daughter of a wealthy Jewish New York family that owned a Fifth Avenue department store, Arbus attended a progressive prep school and married her childhood sweetheart at 18. With a mutual interest in photography the couple founded a commercial photography business and began shooting for fashion magazines, despite declaring that they despised the fashion world. As a student of legendary photographer (and fellow PP bad girl) Lisette Model, Arbus began to hone her documentary style and in 1963 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Drawn to photographing people on the fringes of society, often due to their physical characteristics, her images were and still are considered controversial. Arbus chose to photograph giants and dwarfs, transvestites and nudists, and said photographing her subjects made her feel a mixture of shame and awe. Often dismissed as a voyeur or rich girl who wanted to live like common people, she had a genuine respect for her subjects, capturing them in a passive and non-judgmental way. “Freaks were born with their trauma,” she said, “they’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Always ill-at-ease in the plush Park Avenue world in which she was raised, referring to her family wealth as “humiliating”, Arbus suffered depression and she committed suicide in 1971. http://diane-arbus-photography.com
Leni Reifenstahl (1902 - 2003)
Bad Girl credentials:
Her aesthetic has influenced both sport and fashion photographers.
Prepped for a career in show business from an early age, her good looks and athletic figure made Riefenstahl the epitome of the modern German women of the era. Starring in many German mountaineering films popular at the time, counting Hitler among her fans. Mesmorised by the Nazi party leader, she began to make make propaganda films for the Third Reich with a strong aesthetic style. Many critics agreed that despite the unpalatable subject matter, her film Triumph des Willens chronicling the Nuremberg Rally evelated her to one of the century’s best film makers . In 1936 she filmed the Berlin Olympics using pioneering techniques that are still used in modern sports photography. After the war Riefenstahl moved to Africa and took up stills photography, shooting Sudenese tribes and winning the respect of the local people who knew nothing of her past. Despite her unsavoury past, Riefenstahl created an extraordinary aethetic, influencing so many who have come after her, from sports photographers to fashion legend Herb Ritts. http://leni-riefenstahl.de
Cindy Sherman (1954 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Cindy Sherman used herself as the subject matter for her conceptual portraits exploring the notion of identity. Challenging the representation of women in the media, society and the creation of art.
Sherman became interested in the visual arts at college, where she began painting. Frustrated with what she saw as the medium's limitations, she abandoned it and became a photographer. While at college she met the artist Robert Longo who encouraged her to record her process of getting dressed up for parties. It was the beginning of her photographic career. Typically her work revolves around her photographing herself in a range of costumes. Her landmark 69 photograph series, the Complete Untitled Film Stills, Sherman appeared as B-movie, foreign film and film noir style actresses. A series, dated 2003, features her as clowns. Although Sherman does not consider her work feminist, many of her photo-series, like the 1981 "Centerfolds," call attention to the stereotyping of women in films, television and magazines. Many people find Sherman's work, both disturbing and funny, but there is no disagreement over the fact that Shermans work is all about her.
Lisette Model (1901 - 1983)
Bad Girl credentials:
Shot with a gut feeling and revealed the sadness of her subjects.
Austrian-born Model trained as a musician before taking up the camera in her 20s. In her 30s she left Europe and moved with her husband, Russian-born artist Evsa Model, to New York, where her candid and often satirical portraits caught the attention of legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch of Harper’s Bazaar. An instinctive photographer who advised: “Don't shoot until you feel it in your gut,” she worked on assignments for the magazine from 1943 to 1955 and began to show her work in the city. She always shot with passion, catching many of her subjects off guard, more often than not revealing negative aspects of the human condition such as loneliness and sadness. The closely-cropped images of the privileged classes she shot on the Promenade des Anglais while visiting her mother in Nice are among her most famous. In 1951 she began a teaching career and counted among her students Diane Arbus, who was heavily influenced by Model.
Taryn Simon (1975 - present)
Bad Girl credentials:
Creates quietly unsettling yet beautiful images. Had to monitor her own levels of radioactivity after shooting in a nuclear waste storage facility.
New York-born and raised, Simon not only examines uneasy subject matter but also looks at the role of photography itself within her work. For her project The Innocents, Simon portrayed individuals who were wrongfully convicted and subsequently served time for serious crimes. In these photographs she addressed photography's ability to affect the outcome of the trials of her subjects through mugshots, Polaroids and mistaken identity. In doing this, Simon is questioning photography as an arbiter of the truth. In Contraband Simon presents 1,075 stark images of items confiscated at New York’s JFK Airport and through the US Mail. While some of the objects, such as counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags or a plastic container of salami, seem innocuous, other images carry more sinister overtones, such as a gallon tub of a liquid commonly used as a date rate drug or an unidentified bag of white powder. Through her work, Simon is constantly looking at issues that remain largely unknown tomost Americans. To shoot the four-year project An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar Simon put herself into many strange and potentially harmful situations to capture hidden aspects of life within America’s borders, from a nuclear waste storage facility, where she had to monitor her levels of radioactive contamination, to a bear cave. Although her subject matter is often unsavoury, Simon tries to capture them with beauty and care. www.tarynsimon.com
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 - 1879)
Bad Girl credentials:
An obsessive photographer from the age of 48 after receiving a camera as a gift, she was mocked for her style, which included deliberately shooting out of focus.
Born in Calcutta to a British colonial family, Cameron was given a camera by her daughter at the age of 48, which was to be the start of a brief but obsessive affair with photography. With her new camera, the smitten Cameron set about converting the chicken house of her English home into a studio and a month later recorded what she termed “my first success”, a portrait of a young girl called Annie. Its style, a large-scale, head and shoulders portrait, was one she was to repeat throughout her work. Cameron wanted to transcend the realism of photography and experimented with different techniques in an attempt to create a high-artaesthetic. Despite being mocked for her style – she often created smudged prints, used cracked negatives and consciously left the lens out of focus – she did receive recognition from the art world in her lifetime. As a member of English polite society she had access to the great people of her time; she shot hundreds of portraits in her dreamy style, with the subjects often sitting for up to seven minutes for one image.In 1875 Cameron moved to Ceylon, where she found it difficult to get photographic materials. Her short but intense affair with photography ended but thanks to her fastidiously documenting and copywriting all her work, Cameron left a vast collection of ethereal Victorian portraits that capture the spirit and figures of the era.
Featured in the November issue of the magazine, back issues are available online or by calling 01858 438832
To read our feature on the 25 Bad Boys of Photography click here.
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