Photo Finish Trivia Quiz

Answer: Anthony Armstrong-Jones

Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon, was the photographer probably best known for being as famous as the subjects he captured on film. He was catapulted into the limelight when he married Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1960 and subsequently granted the title of the first Earl of Snowdon.

Born on 7 March 1930, the future earl discovered photography while he was recovering from polio which he contracted when he was sixteen. After being educated at Eton College, he attended Cambridge University to study architecture, but left to pursue a career as a photographer. He started as the society photographer for "Tatler" magazine and specialized in portraits, photographing such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich, Rudolf Nureyev and Katharine Hepburn amongst many others. After his marriage to Princess Margaret, he became the "go-to" photographer for the royal family and was responsible for capturing many an important milestone such as the first official portraits of Diana Spencer and the Prince of Wales on their engagement.

Lord Snowdon and Princess Margaret divorced in 1978, but he remained close to the royal family and continued to take official portraits. His career branched out into design and documentary work and he designed the aviary at London Zoo. He also won two Emmy awards in 1968 for his documentary on aging entitled "Don't Count the Candles". Lord Snowdon died at his home in Kensington London on 13 January 2017 at the age of 86.

Answer: Dorothea Lange

In the photographs she produced of the destitute and desperate while working for the FSA (Farm Security Administration) in the 1930s, Dorothea Lange brought to light the consequences of the Great Depression and shaped the future of documentary photography. Images such as "White Angel Breadline" (1933) and "Migrant Mother" (1936) documented the rural poverty and exploitation of migrant labourers that was rife at the time. The latter image of a young migrant mother called Florence Owens Thompson is perhaps her best known work and now hangs in the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

Lange was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey on 24 May 1895. She adopted her mother's maiden name of Lange after her parents divorced. After studying photography at Columbia University, she moved to San Francisco and, while running a portrait studio, began photographing homeless and unemployed people she saw on the streets leading to her employment with the FSA. Twenty-two of her images were used by John Steinbeck in "The Harvest Gypsies" published by the San Francisco News in 1936. During World War II, Lange was employed by the War Relocation Authority of the Office of War Information to document the internment of Japanese Americans and, in 1940, was the first woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1945 she accepted an invitation from Ansel Adams to join the Fine Art Photography Department at the California School of Fine Arts.

Lange was dogged by ill-health in her later years and died of esophageal cancer on 11 October 1965. In 1966, three months after her death, she was the first photographer to be awarded a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Answer: Ansel Adams

Ansel Eastman Adams created some of the most iconic and most widely reproduced photographs of all time. His black and white landscape portraits of the American wilderness and, in particular, of Yosemite National Park helped transform photography into a fine art form. He was also a passionate conservationist who through his photography and his membership of the Sierra Club, was instrumental to the success in having areas such as Sequoia and Kings Canyon proclaimed as National Parks. His 1938 book "Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail" and his testimony before congress was deemed vital to this success of this mission.

Adams was born in San Francisco on February 20 1902 and it was during a visit to Yosemite National Park in 1916 that he began experimenting with photography. He was self taught and developed and sold his plates through Best's Studio in Yosemite. He went onto marry the owner's daughter, Virginia, in 1928 and ran the studio which is now known as the Ansel Adams Gallery until 1971. In 1927 he began his love affair with conservation when he joined the Sierra Club which was dedicated to preserving the "wild places of the planet". His photographs were published in the society's bulletin and he eventually went on to serve as a member of the society's board of directors for 37 years. In 1968 Adams was awarded the Conservation Service Award, the highest civilian honour awarded by the Department of the Interior. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter awarded Adams the Presidential Medal of Freedom for "his efforts to preserve the country's wild and scenic areas both on film and on earth."

Adam's photograph "The Tetons and the Snake River" is one of the 115 images that were included on the "Voyager Golden Record" sent on board the Voyager spacecraft when it was launched. Ansel Adams died from cardiovascular disease at Monterey Hospital in California on April 22 1984 at the age of 82.

Answer: Robert Capa

Despite his quote that "it is the war photographer's most fervent wish to be unemployed", Robert Capa covered some of the most bloody conflicts in world history and produced what "Time" magazine called, in their list of Top One Hundred Photographs, "some of the most influential images of all time".

Capa was born Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary on 22 October 1913. He fled the turmoil of Hungary for Berlin in 1930 before moving to Paris in 1933 where he shared a studio with Henri Cartier-Bresson. It was there the following year that he adopted the name of Robert Capa. Working as a photojournalist, between 1936 and 1939 he covered the Spanish Civil War where he shot one of his most famous images "Death of a Loyalist Soldier" in 1936. During World War II Capa was the war correspondent for "LIFE" magazine and, in this role, was the only still photographer to wade ashore on Omaha Beach with the first wave of troops on D-Day in 1944.It was here that he shot was has become known as the "Magnificent Eleven" images. These are the eleven photos which are all that remain from the 106 frames that Capa shot on that eventful day. The others were sadly destroyed in a darkroom accident during development. After the war was over, Capa was one of the co-founders along with Henri Cartier-Bresson of Magnum, a co-operative photographic agency.

He continued to cover the world's hotspots including such conflicts as the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. Unfortunately, however, his maxim of "if your photographs are not good enough, it is because you are not close enough" caught up with him. While on assignment covering the French war in Indochina, Capa stepped on a landmine in Thai Binh in Vietnam on 25 May 1954 and was killed. He was just 40 years of age.

Answer: Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz, the husband of American artist Georgia O'Keefe, was the American photographer and gallery owner who is credited with turning photography into an art form on a par with painting and sculpture. He was also responsible for introducing modern art to the American market and his galleries were the home to the debut exhibitions in the United States of such artists as Picasso, Rodin, Matisse and Cezanne.

Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey on 1 January 1864 and began taking photographs during the period that he and his family lived in Germany in the 1880's. Upon his return to America he became of the owner of a small photographic company and the co-editor of the "American Amateur Photographer". Increasingly he saw photography as an aesthetic art form, not merely a way of recording history. In 1902, along with F Holland-Day, he founded the Photo-Secession Movement which was bent on promoting the craftsmanship involved in photography and edited the group's magazine "Camera Work" until 1917. He also opened the "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession", which was the first gallery to give equal importance to photographs and paintings. A number of influential galleries followed including the famous "291" where his patronage of modern art had a profound influence on the careers of a number of artists, not least that of his wife, Georgia O'Keefe who he married in 1924.

Dogged by ill-health in his later years Stieglitz died of a stroke in Manhattan on 13 July 1946. In recognition of his importance both as a photographer and as a proponent of photography as an art form, he was inducted into the Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1971.

Answer: Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White's achievements as a photographer are legendary. The fact that she was a woman in a male dominated world makes them even more impressive. She was the first staff photographer for both "Fortune" and "LIFE" magazine and it was one of her images "Fort Peck Dam in Montana" which graced the first ever cover of "LIFE" on 23 November 1936. She was the first Western photographer to be given access to the Soviet Union during its industrial revolution in the 1930's. She was the only Western photographer in Moscow when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and till managed to take a portrait of Joseph Stalin during the chaos. She was the first woman to be accredited to cover combat zones in World War II. The list is long and stellar!

She was born Margaret White in the Bronx. New York on 14 June 1904 and in 1927 added her mother's maiden name of Bourke to become known as Margaret Bourke-White. After studying at Cornell University, she married and moved to Cleveland, Ohio where she began work as an architectural and industrial photographer. This work brought her to the attention of Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who brought her back to New York as the staff photographer for first "Fortune" and then "LIFE" magazines. Her achievements at "LIFE" in particular are the stuff of adventure novels and included being torpedoed in the Mediterranean and being pulled from the Chesapeake after a helicopter crash. One of her most famous photos is the image she took in 1946 of Mahatma Gandhi with his spinning wheel while covering the India-Pakistan conflict.

In 1953 Margaret Bourke-White was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease which eventually forced her to abandon her career. She died in Stamford Connecticut on on 27 August 1971 aged 67.

Answer: Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton was a multi-talented artist. He began his career as a fashion photographer for "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines, gaining a reputation for his daring choices of positioning his sitters against unusual backgrounds. During the 1930's he was the photographer of choice for high society and was a favourite of the royal family. He was the only photographer to record the 1937 wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson and took the official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on her coronation day in 1953. This portrait is considered to be one of the iconic royal images of the twentieth century and now hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum. During World War II he was an official war photographer and his 1940 image of Eileen Dunne, a young victim of the Blitz, is considered to be one of the unforgettable photographs of the conflict. After the war he continued with his work as a portrait photographer while increasingly indulging in his passion for costume and set design. This passion led to his winning Academy Awards for his work on "Gigi" in 1958 and on the 1964 film version of "My Fair Lady".

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born in Hampstead, England on 14 January 1904 and received his first camera at the age of eleven. Although he enrolled at Cambridge University, he left to pursue his interest in photography, becoming one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century and influencing the work of such later artists as Mario Testino and David Bailey. Beaton was awarded a knighthood by the Queen in 1972. In 1974 he suffered a stroke while left him partially paralysed and he died, four days after his 76th birthday, on 18 January 1980 at his home in Broad Chalke, England. He was also known for his waspish tongue and once declared that "perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore."

Answer: Henri Cartier-Bresson

French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered to be the one of the most influential figures in the history of photography. He took photography out of the studio and into the streets to try and capture what he called the "decisive moment", those unguarded reactions of people found in public places. He summed up this approach by saying " photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event." He specialised in spontaneous photographs and this approach to photography has led to him being called the "father of photo-journalism".

Cartier-Bresson was born in Canteloup-en-Brie in France on August 22 1908. His interest in photography began in 1931 during a hunting trip to Africa and he began working as a photographer. Success came quickly and he had exhibitions of his work around the world. After spending a good portion of World War II as a prisoner of war, he escaped in 1943 and secretly began documenting the German occupation of France. In 1947, together with Robert Capa and others, he founded Magnum, a co-operative photo agency owned by its members. He travelled the world covering such diverse events as Gandhi's funeral in India to the civil war in China to the independence movement in Indonesia. His first book "The Decisive Moment" was published in 1952 with a cover drawn by the artist, Henri Matisse.

In 1966 he left Magnum and gave up photography to concentrate on his first passion, drawing and painting. Henri Cartier-Bresson died in Cereste France on 3 August 2004 at the age of 95.

Answer: Yousuf Karsh

Yousuf Karsh's iconic 1941 photograph of a scowling Winston Churchill starting belligerently at the camera is probably one of the most reproduced images of all time and is the image used on the British five pound note that went into circulation in September 2016. The photograph's name comes from the compliment Churchill paid Karsh after he had taken the shot when he said "you can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed."

Karsh was born in Mardin in what was then Turkish Armenia on 23 December 1908. At the age of sixteen he was sent to live in Canada with his uncle who was a photographer to escape the turmoil of his native land. The young Karsh showed exceptional talent as a photographer and after serving an apprenticeship in Boston, he moved to Ottawa in 1931. Here his work attracted the attention of the then Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, who arranged for him to photograph visiting dignitaries. This led to the sitting with Winston Churchill which changed his life. Karsh is best known for his portraits that use an interplay of shadow and light and he summed up his philosophy by saying that "within every man and woman a secret is hidden and as a photographer it is my task to reveal it if I can." In 2000 the "International Who's Who" published its list of the one hundred most notable people of the century. Karsh had photographed 51 of them and was the only Canadian to make the list. He died on 13 July 2002 at the age of 93 from complications from surgery.

Answer: Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon's influence on the world of fashion photography once led the New York Times to dub him the "eye of fashion" and to declare in his obituary that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century". Celebrated for innovative fashions shoots where he emphasised both emotion and movement in his images, he was also a highly regarded portrait photographer whose subjects ranged from President Eisenhower to Marilyn Monroe to Martin Luther King Jnr to ordinary people in the street. His life was the inspiration for the character of Dick Avery (played by Fred Astaire in the 1957 movie "Funny Face".

Richard Avedon was born in New York City on 15 May 1923 and began his photography career at the age of twelve. He served in the Merchant Marines during World War II mainly taking identity portraits of sailors. After the war he joined the staff of "Harper's Bazaar" where he remained for twenty years. He gained a reputation for avant-garde and strikingly original fashion shoots. A print of his iconic photograph of "Dovima with Elephants" from 1955 where he placed a model in a Dior gown between two circus elephants sold at a Christies' auction in 2010 for the princely sum of $266 500. He also became well known for his black and white portraits. After leaving "Harper's Bazaar", he worked for "Vogue" and in 1992 became the first staff photographer for "New Yorker"magazine. It was while he was on assignment for the magazine in San Antonio that he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died on 1 October 2004 at the age of 81.