Iconic fashion, celebrity and still photographer Irving Penn has died. He was 92 years old.
An assistant to Penn said he died at his home Wednesday in New York. No cause was given.
Known for his graceful, minimalistic portraits, Penn became known as one of the first artists to straddle the line dividing commercial and art photography.
He began his career in the 1940s at Vogue fashion magazine, quickly abandoning his dream of becoming a painter. His preference for shooting his subjects isolated against stark backgrounds soon became legendary.
Penn took a number of iconic portraits of famous people, including painter Pablo Picasso, writer Truman Capote, and Penn's own wife, model Lisa Fonssagrives, who died in 1992.
Later in his career, Penn moved to doing still-lifes and portraits, capturing subjects as varied as cigarette butts to ordinary tradespeople.
A number of his works are on display in museums in the United States.

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Berenice Abbott is one of the most significant figures in photography and her accomplishments in the field were more wide ranging than any of her contemporaries. Berenice Abbott not only offers a comprehensive retrospective of her complete oeuvre, encompassing all the primary projects she undertook in her 60 year career, but also presents this work in context with her other accomplishments: inventor, author, teacher and photo historian. This two volume book is the definitive publication on the life and work of one of the masters of the photographic medium.

Volume I contains Abbott’s portraits beginning in Paris in the 1920s. They include many of the most notable and influential writers, artists, politicians and personalities of the day. Less known aspects of her work are also well represented, such as her images of the American Scene including her ground breaking US Route 1 project and her Portrait of Maine in the 1960s.
Also in Volume I is Abbott’s final major undertaking considered by many to be her crowning achievement – documenting science. It consumed her from 1939 to1961, culminating with three triumphant years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, producing work of astounding beauty and clarity for the Physical Science Study Committee.
Volume II is devoted to her photographs of New York. The monumental project Changing New York documenting the physical and social changes of the city in the 1930s is supplemented by her photographs prior to and after that work as well as those of Greenwich Village in 1947/1948.
Edited by Ron Kurtz and Natalie Evans, published by Steidl

Click to see slide show of Abbott's photographs 

Lost Photos of the Young Beatles and Rolling Stones (1964-66) to Debut at New NYC Gallery

Forty-five years after The Beatles and The Rolling Stones first came to America, an extraordinary collection of "lost" photos of the young bands has just been discovered. The 3500 photographs -- extraordinary, intimate and unpublished -- were taken by Bob Bonis, their U.S. Tour manager, during their first U.S. tours (1964, 1965 and 1966) and document perhaps the most critical point in their careers: coming to America.

The Bob Bonis Archive of photographs is now exclusively represented by the Not Fade Away Gallery, which has announced its first show, "The British Are Coming: The Beatles and The Rolling Stones 1964-66," to inaugurate the Gallery, March 4-April 14. The Not Fade Away Gallery is located in New York City at 901 Broadway, 2nd floor, at the corner of 20th Street.

The Gallery's first exhibition will feature 50+ images of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones that establish the unparalleled access and close friendship Bob Bonis (1932-1991) had with the young men who became the most significant rock musicians of the 20th century. Revealing a private, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the early days of rock 'n' roll, the photos show the boys in candid, intimate shots on stage, in rehearsal, in concert, backstage (tuning up, waiting to go on stage and clowning around), dressing and relaxing, on

vacations or en route to shows or cities, getting haircuts, bowling, recording in the studio, at press events and just hanging around being themselves. "The discovery of so many never-before-seen photographs of the two most influential bands in rock history, captured at the most pivotal time in their careers, is a once-in-a-lifetime event," says Larry Marion, founder/director of Not Fade Away Gallery (http://www.notfadeawaygallery.com/ ) and an acknowledged expert in the field of music memorabilia. "In more than twenty years as a rock 'archeologist,' I've never come upon a discovery of this magnitude -- thousands of extraordinary unpublished photographs of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones -- young, innocent and unguarded. This is likely the largest single trove of such important unknown photographs ever uncovered."

For over forty years, the negatives and slides were safely stored away unbeknownst to anyone but Bob Bonis' family. Bob's son Alex recently unearthed them and brought them -- along with his father's collection of memorabilia from his Tour Manager days -- to Larry Marion for appraisal. In fact, the photos were at the bottom of a duffel bag of memorabilia -- brought out almost as an afterthought. Now, Alex Bonis is one of the partners in Not Fade Away Gallery, which will begin to make these images available for exhibition and for sale as museum-quality fine art photographic prints (both black-and-white and color), in extremely limited editions, printed on era-appropriate paper, utilizing traditional photographic printing methods.

A private man, Bob Bonis never sought publicity and wasn't interested in pursuing attention based on his past exploits. He started out as a New York City talent agent in the late 1950s and through a series of unremarkable circumstances, he came to hold an extraordinary position at a pivotal time in rock history -- U.S. Tour Manager for both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones during their first U.S. tours in 1964 and continuing through 1966. Since his personal passion was photography, he took his camera along wherever he could and took photos of everyone he worked with -- capturing incredibly intimate photos that the world is about to see for the very first time.

In addition to more than 3,500 photos he took of The Beatles and The Stones, Bob photographed Simon & Garfunkel, The Hollies, Cream, The Lovin' Spoonful, Buddy Rich, Frank Sinatra and many of the jazz greats he worked with. Not Fade Away Gallery has upcoming shows of these photographs scheduled for the coming year.

The extraordinary private moments Bob Bonis captured are now available for all fans and collectors of music and fine art photography to see and experience at Not Fade Away Gallery, honoring the life and work of Bob Bonis.

NEW YORK, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire/ --

Click to view a slide show of Bonis's photographs

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Photographer Annie Leibovitz has borrowed £10million against some of her most famous pictures to raise funds to off the mortgages on her homes.
The images include those taken for the 1981 Rolling Stone front cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono shot on the day of Lennon's death, the photograph of a naked and pregnant Demi Moore, images of Michelle Obama for Vanity Fair and of a semi-nude singer and actress Miley Cyrus taken for the same magazine.

An influential photobook once scorned for its stark portrayal of 1950s American society is now celebrated for its brutal honesty.
Robert Frank's The Americans is being commemorated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

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Click to view slideshow

Washington, DC– The 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking publication will be celebrated in the nation’s capital with the exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s "The Americans", premiering January 18 through April 26, 2009, in the National Gallery of Art’s West Building ground floor galleries. In 1955 and 1956, the Swiss-born American photographer Robert Frank (b. 1924) traveled across the United States to photograph, as he wrote, "the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere." The result of his journey was The Americans, a book that looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a culture on the brink of massive social upheaval and one that changed the course of 20th-century photography.

First published in France in 1958 and in the United States in 1959, The Americans remains the single most important book of photographs published since World War II. The exhibition will examine both Frank’s process in creating the photographs and the book by presenting 150 photographs, including all of the images from The Americans, as well as 17 books, 15 manuscripts, and 28 contact sheets. In honor of the exhibition, Frank has created a film and participated in selecting and assembling three large collages. The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 17 through August 23, 2009, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 22 through December 27, 2009.
"The Americans is as powerful and provocative today as it was 50 years ago," said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art. "We are immensely grateful to Robert Frank and his wife, June Leaf, for their enthusiastic participation and assistance in all aspects of this exhibition and its equally ambitious catalogue. We also wish to thank Robert Frank for his donation of archival material related to The Americans, in addition to gifts of his photographs and other exhibition prints to the National Gallery of Art in 1990, 1994, and 1996, all of which formed the foundation of the project."
The exhibition has been organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

"The Americans"
During Robert Frank’s 10,000-mile journey across more than 30 states spanning nine months in 1955–1956, the young photographer took 767 rolls of film—more than 27,000 images—and made more than 1,000 work prints. He spent a year editing and selecting the photographs and constructing the sequence. When The Americans was published in 1958/1959, it revealed a country that many knew existed but few had acknowledged. Frank depicted a people often plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians, and rendered numb by a rapidly rising culture of consumption. Yet he also found new areas of beauty in overlooked corners of the country and in the process helped redefine the icons of America. In his photographs of diners, cars, and even the road itself, Frank pioneered a seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style that was as innovative as his subjects. Also groundbreaking was the way he tightly sequenced his photographs in The Americans, linking them thematically, conceptually, formally, emotionally, and linguistically to present a haunting picture of mid-century America.
The Exhibition
Looking In: Robert Frank’s "The Americans" is the most comprehensive and in-depth exploration of Frank’s original book ever undertaken. The exhibition will be organized into four sections:
The first section will examine the roots of The Americans, not only in Frank's earlier hand-made books, including 40 Fotos (1946), Peru (1949), and Black White and Things (1952), but also in other sequences of photographs he made at this time, such as People You Don't See (1952). It will also present books by his contemporaries, such as Bill Brandt, Alexey Brodovitch, and Jakob Tuggener, whose ideas influenced the young photographer.
The second section will display Frank’s original application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (which funded his primary work on the project), along with his vintage contact sheets, letters to photographer Walker Evans and author Jack Kerouac, and two manuscript versions of Kerouac’s introduction to the book. Three collages with a total of more than 115 rough work prints reveal the themes Frank wanted his book to explore—racism, politics, consumer culture, cars, families, and the way Americans lived, worked, and played—as well as his preliminary selection of images. The work prints were made in 1956 and 1957, and the collages were assembled under the artist’s supervision in 2007 and 2008.
The third section features all 83 photographs from The Americans, often in rarely exhibited vintage prints, and in the sequence that Frank established. The fourth section addresses the impact The Americans had on Frank’s subsequent career, screening a 2008 film made by the artist especially for this exhibition and presenting later still photographs.