Photographer

Joseph Sorrentino's photos of poor and homeless adults and children, on view at the Arts League, make us feel uncomfortable. No fearful looks cloud these faces, but there is an acid edge in this kind of contemporary picture - its hard surface revealing a poignant vulnerability. The emotional turf Sorrentino stakes out is a part of American culture that he approaches like a street photographer. He is not concerned with highly personal states of feeling. His subjects belong to the world of external experience.

Lillian Bassman, 94, a magazine art director and fashion photographer who achieved renown in the 1940s and '50s with high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylphlike models, then reemerged in the '90s as a fine-art photographer after a cache of lost negatives resurfaced, died Monday at her home in New York. Ms. Bassman entered the world of magazine editing and fashion photography as a protégé of Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director of Harper's Bazaar. In addition to providing innovative graphic design, she gave prominent display to future photographic stars like Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, and Louis Faurer, whose work whetted her appetite to become a photographer herself.

Ken Regan, a photojournalist whose reputation for discretion earned him a backstage pass to the private realms of rock stars and other celebrities, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, died last Sunday in Manhattan. The cause was cancer, his daughter Suzanne Regan said. Mr. Regan was the official photographer for the Rolling Stones on several tours in the 1970s and Kennedy's unofficial personal photographer in the last four decades of his life. He was also the official photographer for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, and the Live Aid concert in 1985.

Barry Feinstein, 80, a photographer who chronicled the lives of seminal rock 'n' roll stars of the 1960s, and who was perhaps best known for the stark portrait of Bob Dylan on the cover of the 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin' , died Oct. 20 near his home in Woodstock, N.Y. Besides his work with Dylan, Mr. Feinstein established his reputation as one of rock's semiofficial official chroniclers with two 1970 photographs: one of Janis Joplin,...

NASCAR chairman Bill France wonders whether Tony Stewart might have been provoked into hitting a photographer after a 12th-place finish in the Brickyard 400. While NASCAR continued its investigation yesterday, France said he would be interested in seeing pictures or footage of the confrontation, if any exist. Stewart punched Gary Mook, a freelance photographer for the Indianapolis Star, after Sunday's race. Mook was trying to take pictures of Stewart as he hustled through the garage area, when Stewart stopped and hit him in the chest.

German-born photographer Gunter Sachs, 78, best known for his playboy lifestyle and brief marriage to French actress Brigitte Bardot, has committed suicide, his family said Sunday. In a statement released by his family at his request, Mr. Sachs said he chose to end his life after concluding that he was suffering from an incurable degenerative disease affecting his memory and ability to communicate. "I have always stood up to big challenges," the statement said. It provided no details on the timing or circumstances of his death, but German weekly Focus reported that Mr. Sachs shot himself Saturday at his home in the exclusive Swiss Alpine resort of Gstaad.

Before there was Photoshop, there was, and still is, Jerry Uelsmann, a photographer who decided early in his career that the pictures he wanted to make existed primarily in his imagination. So after a brief flirtation with straight photography in the 1960s, Uelsmann, now 78, turned to photomontage, combining bits and pieces from other photographs. In the digital age, anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and the patience to master Photoshop can do what he did manually, in the darkroom, by printing multiple negatives.

Richard Steinheimer, 81, a master of railroad photography whose poetic images documented a half-century of trains and the landscape of the American West, has died. Mr. Steinheimer died May 4 at his Sacramento, Calif., home of Alzheimer's disease, said his wife, Shirley Burman "He's been called the Ansel Adams of the railroad-photography world," said Phil Hammond, director of the California State Railroad Museum. "He brought an artistic side to a field that is often associated with technology.

Melchior DiGiacomo, a Bergen County, N.J., photographer, is not at odds with life. He likes the pungent aroma of life as it is being lived. What he is at odds with are many of the conventional practices and pieties of photojournalism and commercial photography. So he has been waging a lonely uphill battle to change this and introduce a little individuality - in particular with regard to that most hackneyed of subjects, wedding pictures that photographers are hired to take. When DiGiacomo photographs weddings, which he sometimes does between magazine picture assignments, he is always more interested in choosing expressive detail and in his ability to describe the nature of things rather than in the obvious facts of the event.

Michael "Mike Reno" Garbesi, 53, a freelance photographer of political, entertainment and sports stars, died Tuesday at his home in South Philadelphia. Mr. Garbesi, known throughout Philadelphia as "Mike Reno," often cruised the city with cameras hanging off his neck and a press pass identifying him as a representative of the Philadelphia Exclusive News. "He was a self-employed freelance photographer and sold advertisements for the paper," said J.J. Palumbo, owner of the Exclusive News.

Robert Bauers, 87, of Lower Gwynedd, a commercial photographer in the Philadelphia area for nearly 50 years, died of congestive heart failure Friday, March 29, at the Springhouse Estates retirement community. Mr. Bauers was well-known in commercial photography circles before retiring in the 1990s. He maintained studios near Rittenhouse Square in the 1950s and '60s from which he took pictures for company magazines, ad campaigns, and annual reports. Among his clients was the Bell Telephone Co. In the 1970s and '80s, he worked as a photographer and video specialist at Betz Laboratories, a water-treatment company in Trevose.

Just when you thought all possible uses for found vintage photographs had been exhausted by artists and photographers in their own work in various clever ways, along come Jennifer Greenburg and Anne Massoni, whose solo shows on the Print Center's second floor bring their personal and disparate visions to the anonymous found vintage image. In "Revising History," Greenberg, a Chicago-based artist, presents a series of black-and-white inkjet prints that show her in everyday scenes that seem to have been shot in the 1950s but are in fact images from found negatives dating from that era into which she has inserted herself, replacing an individual in a picture with an image of herself, dressed and coiffed as a housewife of the time.

There's nowhere to hide. Go to a party, gala, or other event in Philadelphia and it's likely that at least one photographer will want to take your picture - that is, if you don't approach them first. These roving shooters-for-hire hit the floor at events as stately as the Academy Ball or the flower show gala. They fill foodie soirees as sumptuous as the Kimmel Center's StarChefs bash or as silly as the Wing Bowl. They find the funkiest parties - InLiquid's gala at Crane Arts, Jimmy Style's Red Carpet Oscar Party - and snap until their digits are sore.

Richard A. Weinberg, 80, of Upper Providence, a dermatologist who practiced in Delaware County for more than 40 years and had a passion for photography, died Sunday, Feb. 3, of cancer at his home. Dr. Weinberg, who opened a medical office on Sproul Road in Springfield in 1964, incorporated his love of photography in his practice. The walls of his waiting room were filled with his photographs. Specializing in nature photography, Dr. Weinberg enjoyed capturing the beauty of the outdoors and often spent hours taking photos at Tyler Arboretum in Media and Ridley Creek State Park in Upper Providence.

SOME CALL HIM the Gordon Parks of Philly. To others, he's "Mr. Tribune. " Whatever you call Robert Mendelsohn, you'd be hard-pressed to find an African-American-oriented society event in recent years that he hasn't photographed for the Philadelphia Tribune , the Philadelphia Sunday Sun or another one of the papers he shoots for as a freelancer. And he does it all using public transportation. "He goes to places at nighttime that I wouldn't go without a car," laughed Jerry Mondesire, publisher of the Philadelphia Sunday Sun . "The beauty of it is that he gets along with so many kinds of people.

Before there was Photoshop, there was, and still is, Jerry Uelsmann, a photographer who decided early in his career that the pictures he wanted to make existed primarily in his imagination. So after a brief flirtation with straight photography in the 1960s, Uelsmann, now 78, turned to photomontage, combining bits and pieces from other photographs. In the digital age, anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and the patience to master Photoshop can do what he did manually, in the darkroom, by printing multiple negatives.

Stephen Anthony "Tony" Gaye, 65, of Northern Liberties, a commercial and fine-art photographer who had studios in and around Philadelphia for about 30 years, died Thursday, Dec. 13, of a heart attack at his home. Mr. Gaye, who described himself as a "studio still-life photographer," was known for his work for advertisers and his fine-art work in galleries, said Frank Bolling, a longtime friend. "He did the photographs for the most recent Campbell's annual report," Bolling said.

For years, even as it grew in size, the University of Pennsylvania's photography collection was largely unseen and inaccessible. More than 800 prints languished in portfolio cases on the uppermost shelves in storage until Lynn Marsden-Atlass, a year into her tenure as director and curator of Penn's Arthur Ross Gallery, decided to see what those cases contained. In the fall of 2011, she invited Gabriel Martinez, an artist and senior lecturer in photography in Penn's Department of Fine Arts, to organize an exhibition of some of the collection's notable photographs.

Ken Regan, a photojournalist whose reputation for discretion earned him a backstage pass to the private realms of rock stars and other celebrities, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, died last Sunday in Manhattan. The cause was cancer, his daughter Suzanne Regan said. Mr. Regan was the official photographer for the Rolling Stones on several tours in the 1970s and Kennedy's unofficial personal photographer in the last four decades of his life. He was also the official photographer for Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1975, and the Live Aid concert in 1985.

As seen in his book, Gomorrah Girl , published by Cross Editions in 2011, Valerio Spada's documentary photographs of adolescents navigating Naples' crime-ridden streets were striking enough to win him Blurb's 2011 Photography Book Now grand prize for best book of the year. As large prints displayed on the walls of the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, where Spada is exhibiting them for the first time, they're less obviously tied to the book's narrative, which makes them even more powerful.