Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Šechtl and Voseček

The photographic studio Šechtl and Voseček was founded in Tábor (Bohemia) in 1888 by Ignác Šechtl, who accepted his assistant Jan Voseček as co-member of his photographic studio. The history of Šechtl & Voseček Studios goes back to 1863, when Ignác Schächtl (1840 – 1911) made the decision to leave his work as a clerk…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Pierre Rossier

Pierre Joseph Rossier (1829 – 1898) was a pioneering Swiss photographer whose albumen photographs, which include stereographs and cartes-de-visite, comprise portraits, cityscapes, and landscapes. Until very recently, little was known about Rossier; even his given name was a mystery. Documents discovered in the Fribourg town archives finally proved that his given name was Pierre, and it can…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Louis Boutan

Louis Boutan was a French biologist and a pioneer in the field of underwater photography that would be unmatched by anyone else for decades. He was born in Versailles and studied biology and natural history at the University of Paris where he became a lab assistant at the age of 20. In 1880, he was named deputy head by…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Augustín Víctor Casasola

Agustín Víctor Casasola was a Mexican photographer and partial founder of the Mexican Association of Press Photographers. He was born in Mexico City on July 28,1874 and apprenticed as a typographer. He later became a reporter for El Imparicial, which was one of the official newspapers of the Díaz government. Typography demands precision, a sense…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Leslie Gill

Leslie Gill among a group of photographers who elevated the editorial still life photograph to a unique American art form. Gill studied painting with Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and graduated with honours from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1929. While working as art director of House Beautiful magazine, Gill began to make his own…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – John Carbutt

John Carbutt as a photographic pioneer, stereo card publisher, and photographic entrepreneur. He was the first person to use celluloid for photographic film and to market dry-plate glass negative. He was born in Sheffield, England on 2 December 1832 and moved to Chicago in 1853. Carbutt founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works in 1879 and was the first to develop…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Lai Afong

Lai Afong was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, one of the early photographic studios in Hong Kong. Lai Afong was born in Gaoming, Guangdong and arrived in Hong Kong in the 1850s as a refugee of the Taiping Rebellion.  It is not known how he learned the wet-plate collodion process, but, it is said that by as early as 1859 had…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – John Albok

John Albok was a Hungarian photographer who documented street scenes in New York City during the Great Depression and later. John Albok was born in Munkacs, Hungary, in what is now the Ukraine. From the ages of 13 to 17, he trained was a tailor’s apprentice and was later drafted into the Hungarian army. He began…

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Kassian Cephas

Kassian Cephas was a Javanese photographer of the court of the Yogyakarta Sultanate. He was the first indigenous person from Indonesia to become a professional photographer and was trained at the request of Sultan Hamengkubuwana VI (r. 1855–1877). As a youth, Cephas became a pupil of Protestant Christian missionary Christina Petronella Philips-Steven and followed her to nearby Bagelen, Purworejo….

Monday’s Photography Inspiration – Thomas Andrew

Thomas Andrew was a New Zealand photographer who was born in Takapuna in 1855, a suburb in Auckland on the North Island of New Zealand. He worked as a photographer in Napier. He later opened a studio in Auckland which was destroyed by fire. In 1891, he went to Samoa where he worked with two other New Zealand photographers, Alfred John…