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Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903 and was raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. He died in 1975 at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. After attending Williams College, Massachusetts, he lived in Paris and took courses at the Sorbonne. He settled in New York in 1927 and started taking photographs the following year.  His first photographs of early Victorian houses in New England and New York were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. In 1935 he spent time in Mississippi and Alabama photographing tenant farmers and sharecroppers. These photographs were published in a collaborative book with the writer James Agee titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1945 Evans became a staff photographer and then an associate editor for Fortune magazine. After leaving the magazine, he became a professor of graphic design at Yale University’s School of Art, Connecticut. He received many awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1940. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in most major museum collections. Along with Bernice Abbot and Dorothea Lange, Evans established the tradition of documentary photography. He was profoundly affected by the social problems of his time and felt a sense of responsibility to focus on the plight of the less fortunate. By striving to make his images as detached and unemotional as he could, Evans endowed these social commentaries with profound impact.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Richard Estes was born in Kewanee, Illinois, in 1932.  He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, and began his career as a commercial artist, working in publishing and advertising.  In 1959 he moved to New York and quickly rose to prominence as a seminal Photorealist.  He had his first solo show in 1968 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York, and has since participated in numerous national and international exhibitions.  Known primarily as a painter, Estes is also an accomplished printmaker.  His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran.  Virtually synonymous with the urban streetscape, Estes’ art makes contemporary icons out of storefronts, parked vehicles, street furniture, and signage.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Ron English was born in Illinois in 1966 and received his B.A. from the University of Texas in 1986. He began his artistic career making large-scale surrealistic photographs. After finishing graduate school he moved to New York, where he worked as one of many painters at Kostabi World, where thousands of paintings were produced and marketed under Mark Kostabi’s signature. English is among the young generation of artists working in the tradition of the Pop artists of the 1960s such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns. His paintings are often humorous, even cynical, social commentaries, and symbols of money and power are important parts of his imagery.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

Glenn Elvig was born in 1953 in Houston, Texas. He attended the University of Minnesota and received a B.S. in education and ceramics. He began teaching high school, until he realized his passion for furniture making. Elvig was inspired by such artists as Carolyn Vosburg Hall, Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, and Gary Larson. He has taught workshops on furniture design, and exhibited his work through the United States and the world.

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939.  He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississippi, and the University of Mississippi in Oxford.  Considered a master of color realism, Eggleston established his reputation as a photographer with his first one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 at the age of thirty-seven.  Since then he has exhibited internationally and has been widely published, including a portfolio of Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, and a book, The Democratic Forest, a chronicle of the Western world from the Tennessee hills to the Berlin Wall.  He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship the following year.  In addition to his work in photography, Eggleston is an accomplished draftsman and painter.  His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  A “street” photographer in the tradition of Henri Lartigue, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, Eggleston seeks to capture the elusive moment, often with a lurid, unsettling twist.  His largely unpopulated images focus on seemingly insignificant everyday scenes realized in vivid, saturated colors.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.egglestontrust.com/

Melvin Edwards was born on May 4, 1937 in Houston Texas. He received a B.A. from University of Southern California, and went on to teach at Rutgers University in 1972. He focused his teaching in sculpture, drawing and Third World artists. He now lives in New York City and is represented by Alexander Gray Associates. His most well-known work is “Lynch Fragments” which was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. Edwards has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the L. A. County Museum, Los Angeles, California, and the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey. A 30-year retrospective of his sculpture was held in 1993 at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. Several of his works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Museum of Modem Art, New York City, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, and the L. A. County Museum, Los Angeles, California.

www.alexandergray.com/artists/melvin-edwards

Harold E. Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, in 1903 and died in Massachusetts in 1990.  He received a B.S. from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1925, an M.S. in 1927 and a Ph.D. in 1931 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He was professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T. from 1928 until 1972.  He was also a founding partner of Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier, a technical products and services firm.  His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are included in the collections of the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.  As an electrical engineer, he approached the medium as a means of scientific research and was a pioneer in stop-action photography.  In 1931 he invented the stroboscopic flash, which gives off brilliant light for a microsecond, freezing action while rendering precise detail.  Edgerton’s work had a profound influence on the course of twentieth-century photography.  His photographs changed the way we see the world, often transcending the limits of scientific documentation and passing into the realm of visual icon.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.

www.edgerton-digital-collections.org/