The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum (IPHF) recently announced its 2017 class of Photography Hall of Fame inductees, and first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and will honor them at its 2017 Hall of Fame Induction and Awards Ceremony on Friday, Nov. 17 at .ZACK in the Grand Center Arts District. The IPHF annually awards and inducts notable photographers or photography industry visionaries for their artistry, innovation, and significant contributions to the art and science of photography.

Honoree:

Kenny Rogers*, singer, songwriter, record producer, actor, photographer, and author, will receive the 2017 IPHF Lifetime Achievement Award, the first of its kind awarded by the IPHF.

Nine photographers or photography industry visionaries who demonstrate the artistry, passion and revolution of the past and present craft of photography will be inducted into the Hall of Fame, including:

Harry Benson*, iconic portrait photographer

Ernest H. Brooks II*, black-and white underwater photographer

Edward Curtis*, photographer of the American West and the North American Indian

William Eggleston, pioneer of color photography

Anne Geddes*, portrait and infant photographer

Ryszard Horowitz*, pre-digital special effects photographer

James Nachtwey*, photojournalist and war photographer

Cindy Sherman, conceptual portrait photographer

Jerry Uelsmann, photomontage photographer

*Scheduled to appear at induction. Edward Curtis will be represented by a representative. 

A nominating committee of IPHF representatives and notable leaders with a passion for preserving and honoring the art of photography selected the inductees. To be eligible for induction, nominees were considered based on the noteworthy contributions they made to the art or science of photography that had a significant impact on the photography industry and/or history of photography. The inductees, though widely differing in style and practice, are individually seen as significant innovators in their respective fields. They are all risk takers who introduced the world to new means of artistic representation and expression.

“This year, the IPHF is honored to recognize ten creators who have uniquely revolutionized the modern photography industry,” said Patty Wente, Executive Director of the IPHF. “Our 2017 awardees are innovators who broke the norm of tradition and conceived their own ways of creatively communicating with the world around them.”

In addition to honoring the 2017 class of Photography Hall of Fame inductees and Lifetime Achievement award winner, the IPHF will be honoring the late Ken Whitmire, former IPHF board member, for his many contributions to the Museum and for his passion and commitment to photography.

For more than 50 years, the IPHF has been and remains the only organization worldwide that recognizes and honors significant contributors to the artistic craft and science of photography. The 2017 cohort of awardees and inductees join 79 other artists and innovators, including: Steve Jobs, Annie Leibovitz, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams.

In addition to their commitment to the Photography Hall of Fame, the IPHF strives to educate the public about photographic history and to collect, exhibit, and preserve historical items and images. IPHF’s impressive permanent collection contains works from more than 500 artists, nearly 5,000 historical cameras, and more than 30,000 photographs. More information on the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum can be found at www.iphf.org.

About the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient:

Kenny Rogers
Grammy Award-winning country superstar and music icon Kenny Rogers has enjoyed great success during his storied career of nearly six decades.  The enduring Country Music Hall of Fame member and pop superstar has endeared music lovers around the globe, selling more than 120 million albums worldwide. Captivating audiences with his musical storytelling craft, Rogers discovered his talent for telling a new kind of storytelling: one with his camera lens. Establishing himself as a well-respected photographer, Rogers’s diverse career is reflected in his varied photographic portfolio, which contains breathtaking land and cityscapes and captivating Presidential and celebrity portraiture. In 2014, Rogers received an Honorary Masters of Photography from the Professional Photographers of America for his artistic photographic contributions.

About the 2017 Photography Hall of Fame inductees:

Harry Benson
Award-winning Scottish photojournalist Harry Benson began his career on The Hamilton Advertiser and Scottish Daily Sketch. In 1964, Benson traveled to America with The Beatles to document their first U.S. tour and never looked back. Under contract to LIFE Magazine for 30 years, Benson has photographed the last 12 U.S. Presidents, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., visited Michael Jackson at Neverland and photographed the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. His work has appeared in countless magazines including Time, Vanity Fair, and Newsweek. He has received three Honorary Doctorates. Twice named NPPA Photographer of the Year; he was made a CBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2009 and received the ICP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. The author of 16 books, Benson is subject of the 2016 documentary HARRY BENSON SHOOT FIRST.

Ernest H. Brooks II
Ernest H. Brooks II, son of the founder of the internationally-renowned Brooks Institute of Photography, has achieved international acclaim for his breathtaking underwater photography. Brooks has been a trailblazer in the development of underwater photographic equipment and technique. Although he has harnessed and implemented much of that new technology at a time when color underwater photographs overwhelmingly illustrate magazines and brochures, he favors black and white. His photographic legacy is one that illustrates the changes in our environment, while he himself remains a tremendous voice in our need to witness the effect of such changes. He is a member of the Professional Photographers of America and is one of forty photographers in the world admitted to the prestigious Camera Craftsmen of America.

Edward Curtis
Edward Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs across his 30-year career and is remembered for creating an immense landmark portfolio documenting and preserving the history and culture of the North American Indian. Curtis’s career began with his appointment as the official photographer for the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 where he photographed everything from glaciers to Eskimo settlements. On a trip to Montana following the 1899 Expedition, Curtis became deeply moved by the Piegan people living there, which set his career on a path for which he would become widely known for.  Financially supported by Theodore Roosevelt and investment banker, J.P. Morgan, in 1906 Curtis set out on a journey across the American West to photograph dozens of native tribes. By 1930, Curtis had published the last of his 20-volume publication, The North American Indian, but to little acclaim, in large part to the stock market crash of 1929. He died in 1952, estranged from his family and with little notoriety for his photographic artistry. In the 1970s, Curtis’s work was rediscovered and he is survived by the legacy of his attempt to create a timeless vision and history of Native American Indian culture during a time when western expansion had irrevocably altered their way of life.
 
William Eggleston
With a career spanning nearly six decades, William Eggleston has become most widely known for a singular pictorial style that captures vernacular subject matter in a vivid, sophisticated color format. In 1976, Eggleston’s work was featured in the first major presentation of color photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in a solo exhibition, Color Photographs by William Eggleston, which is often heralded an important moment in the medium’s acceptance within the art-historical canon. Throughout this career, Eggleston taught at Harvard University, published several books and portfolios, experimented with video production, and photographed movie sets documenting the making of several films. In 2004, Eggleston was honored with two Lifetime Achievement Awards, one from Getty Images and the other from the International Center of Photography. He was also honored at The Aperture Foundation in 2016.

Anne Geddes
Australian-born photographer Anne Geddes is globally known for capturing the beauty, purity and vulnerability that is the essence of childhood and a celebration of new life.   In 1992 her first calendar, featuring portraits of young children, was introduced to great success, resulting in the establishment of The Geddes Philanthropic Trust, dedicated to raising funds for the prevention of child abuse and neglect.  In the recent decade, Geddes has been named Global Advocate for the United Nations Foundation’s Shot@Life Initiative, a campaign to expand access to lifesaving vaccines for children in developing countries; and is also Ambassador for the March of Dimes, whose mission is to improve the health of mothers and babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality.   She has been commissioned to shoot campaigns to educate and raise awareness of medical conditions such as diabetes prevention and meningococcal disease.  Geddes is a multiple New York Times Bestselling Author, a Lifetime Member and Lifetime Achievement award recipient of the Professional Photographers of America, and is Patron of the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers.  In 2005 Anne was honored to be appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (M.N.Z.M.) for services to photography and the community, announced as part of Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday Honors List.

Ryszard Horowitz
Ryszard Horowitz’s award-winning photographs, synthesize art, film-making and design, producing extraordinary and celebrated imagery. Ryszard is considered a pioneer in multi-image special effects photography that predates digital imaging. Most of his work is photocomposed and while it is now assembled digitally, his early compositions were all merged in the dark room, or were based on a single exposure directly in camera. His early fame was established by creating an entire body of work based on an optical illusion reversing perspective the way single eye camera sees it. Ryszard Horowitz was born in Krakow, Poland and as an infant during World War II he and his family were interned in a series of concentration camps. They miraculously survived the war and became amongst the few Jewish families who were able to re-establish their lives in Krakow. Horowitz is one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz. In the late 1950s, as Krakow became the centre of avant-garde arts, and culture, Horowitz documented the birth of Polish jazz and then moving to the United States in 1959 went on photographing American Jazz legends. He became fascinated with American photography and photography would become his lifelong career and passion. He graduated from Pratt Institute in New York, opening his own photography studio in 1967. In the ensuing five decades his work has been exhibited, published and collected around the globe and Ryszard has been awarded every major accolade that can be bestowed on a photographer. He was named All American Photographer of the Year and received several Gold Medals for some of his ground-breaking work, as well as a number of honorary Doctorate degrees.

James Nachtwey
Beginning in 1981, James Nachtwey has dedicated his career to documenting wars and critical social issues, motivated by the belief that public awareness is an essential element in the process of change, and that photographs of war can intervene on behalf of peace. He has photographed conflicts worldwide, from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, to the Rwandan genocide, the Somalian famine, the civil wars in Central America, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the September 11th attack on New York City, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among many others. Nachtwey has also dedicated his career to photographing social issues, like homelessness, drug addiction, poverty, industrial pollution, and global health issues. Nachtwey has been widely celebrated and honored throughout his career, receiving numerous Lifetime Achievement awards, several Photographer of the Year honors and Robert Capa Gold Medals, the TED Prize, the Dresden Prize and a number of honorary Doctorate degrees. “war photographer”, a 2001 feature length documentary about his life and work, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman assumes the roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, and stylist to create her eloquent and provocative photographs. Playing a myriad of characters for the camera, Sherman invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography. Considered one of the most influential artists of her generation, she came to prominence in the late 1970s with a group of artists known as the Pictures Generation. Her 2012 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Dallas Museum of Art. Sherman has participated in four Venice Biennales, co-curating a section at the 55th exhibition. Additionally, her work has been included in five iterations of the Whitney Biennial, two Biennales of Sydney, and the 1983 Documenta. She has been the recipient of the Praemium Imperiale, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.

Jerry Uelsmann
Jerry Uelsmann is an American photographer and professor, credited as a leader of photomontage. As a master printer, Uelsmann is known for producing composite photographs with multiple negatives and detailed darkroom work, blending various images into stunningly complex surrealistic photomontages of landscapes, human subjects, and vernacular structures. Uelsmann found an interest in photography at a young age, and later went on to earn degrees from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Indiana University. Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows and is now part of the permanent collection of numerous prestigious institutions worldwide. In addition to this career as a celebrated photographer, Uelsmann taught in the Department of Art at the University of Florida for 28 years.