Photographer Profiles

Photographer Dorothea Lange is best noted for the image titled “Migrant Mother”—a haunting portrait that came to symbolize the intense suffering caused by America’s Great Depression. Lange’s body of work contains a stunning collection of images that document some of the most difficult times in our history such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and the Japanese American internments camps of World War II.

Brian Dowling is an American photographer living in Berlin, with a project that would drive many of his peers to envy: He traveled to 20 countries across the globe in search of gorgeous redheads to photograph in all their natural beauty.

Imagine this. Take photos of many of the top names in the music industry over the last 30 or so years, from Keith Richards to Radiohead, Gregg Allman to Tom Waits. Shoot for Spin, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, to name a few. Make said images into a coffee-table book. And to top it off, have some obscure talent like Bruce Springsteen write the elegant foreword for the book. Is it just me or does this sound like a pretty good life?

Paul Cary Goldberg has long had a passion for two things: photography and food. A self-taught photographer, Goldberg’s love of food led to an interest in farms and farming as a way of life. Combine all this and you have Goldberg’s latest photo project, which involves documenting the life of the American farmer.

In the late 1980s I took on the challenge of shooting the equestrian culture of the American West. I was passionately interested in photographing the men and women who still follow the traditions of Western horsemanship. They all share an almost mystical love of their equine counterparts and the art of riding. Over a 14-year period I seasonally photographed the Western riders and titled the work the Equestrian West.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” asks Langston Hughes in his famous poem. Photographer Robert Weingarten found a way to fulfill his dream, even though it happened much later in life. In high school, a guidance counselor advised he would have to choose between a career in photography and working in the finance world if he wanted to make some decent money. “I grew up in a tenement in Brooklyn, New York, and hated being poor,” Weingarten recalls. “But I always had a passion for photography and loved taking and developing pictures.”

Being a former member of the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University, I thought about all the incredible memories I experienced and that others, even other students at Texas A&M, might not have known about. In 2012 I began to formulate a project that would both challenge my photographic skills and communicate this experience to the community, and world at large.