Elliot Erwitt

Elliot Erwitt is an American photographer well known for his black and white photos of everyday situations. He captures the ironic or absurd moments and this gives it a different perspective to these common occurrences. 

He uses black and white photography to bring out the fine details in the images. In this photo of a couple rather than take a photo of them he uses the side mirror of the car to view them. He also puts the background out of focus and adds noise to it. This brings more emphasis on the couple.

In this photo he captured a kid and an adult, possibly the father on a see saw. He captured them as the father was going up and the kid going down.Normally this wouldn't happen as the father is bigger. This means that the father helped the little girl out to make her feel better. He also uses reflective surfaces as a recurring motif in his photos. This can be seen in the first photo and the one below.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann is known for her black and white photographs. Going through some of her photographs, i realized that her photos have an eerie feeling to it and the main theme appears to be disorder, decay and death. She uses sharp contrast between the edges and the center of the photo to bring out more detail and her is of lighting is impeccable. 

 In the photo of the river, the contrast and the detail in the rocks was interesting to me. I like how she has the corpuscular rays coming in from the side. The picture has more of a dark tone on the left side and then it brightens as we move to the right. Another one of her photos that appealed to me was the picture of the tree trunk. In it, just the trunk is in focus while the background is out of focus and a little blurry indicating movement. I feel like it shows how the tree is constant as everything around it changes. Also the mark on the trunk adds to the photo and gives somehow personifies the tree.

Arnold Newman

Arnold Newman is an American photographer well known for his "environmental portraits" of his subjects. He also worked with abstract images and he used this experience to capture the essence of the subject in his portraits. 

 His portraits are usually black and white with a sharp contrast and the subject is in focus. The portraits are well lit and this brings more focus to the pictures. This can be clearly seen in the portrait of Pablo Picasso, a renowned painter and sculptor. In his portraits he also tries to capture some element that shows more about the subject and what they do. This can be seen in his portrait of Salvador Dali, who is a famous surrealistic painter. Newman captured the line art that shows what Dali does in his paintings and how abstract he is.