Richard Avedon brief.

Richard Avedon was an American based photographer normally famous for his outstanding fashion photography works; his fashion photos had been celebrated and used for Life, Vougue, and Harper's Bazaar, etc. Avedon was described as the person whose photographs represent the American images of beauty and style for half of a century. 

Avedon often captured his model in a special motion; it could be exact moment or position as his model was posing; that way the photographs that came out were usually dramatic because of the model's motion and the way of composing in the frame. 

His portrait photographs were also extremely expressive in a wide range from celebrities to his acquaintances and ordinary beings; his objective contains from public figures and politicians to celebrities like Marilyn Monroe in his work body, as he self claimed that he was always a portrait photographer. 

 The composition of the entire piece was outstanding without a doubt, but what really makes the difference would be the way of how Avedon position the model in each of his photographs; no matter it is a portrait scape or a fashion cover shot, the art of human form
always stands out and provides an incredible sense of emotion; dramatic, humorous, sometimes scary, emphasizing the dynamic of the picture.

Marcel Duchamp brief.

Marcel Duchamp (Heri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp) is an American artist mostly recognized in painting and sculpting. He was famous as a chess-player beside as a great figure of experimental art as well. He was considered as one of the three artist who helped define and promoted the development of plastic art and in 20th century along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. As a prominent figure in art history, he redefined the art in some way by introducing conceptual art to the world, where the term "Ready made" comes from.
A ready made is a piece of art but almost completely based on a found object; Duchamp took the found object and simply sign it or reposition it to turn the ordinary object to a piece of modern art.

Fountain by Marcel Duchamp

Bicycle wheels by Duchamp

Robert Capa

Robert Capa was a Hungarian photographer born in Budapest, and within his time he began as a darkroom assitant and a journalist photographer; Capa left German because of the rise of Nazi and headed to Paris where he started his career of photojournalist and shared a darkroom with the Henry Cartier-Bresson, one of the greatest figure of candid photographic. He helped Bresson founding the Magum, which turned out to be the most famous world-wide photo agency with a lot of photographer members in it. The influence from masters were shown, as Capa traveled to Spain several times to document the civil war.

 Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936)

                                 

Above is publicly considered as the most famous and representative work of Robert Capa:  Death of a Loyalist Soldier (1936) .  The shocking moment was exceptionally expressive in terms of composition.

Taken during D-Day Invasion.

His pictures taken in the extremely earthy environment have shown a great level of realism with the stunning impact of the moment, as Picture Post titled him "the greatest war photographer in the world." I think the pictures itself are typical examples of documenting reality, but more importantly, the moment he captured in most of his pieces reminds of Bresson's 'decisive moment' theory; so to speak, a decisive moment is a photographer's intuition of capturing the exact moment that could be used as a photo. Capa's body of work express the exact idea of a war photojournalist, which is documenting and recording the real war lives, but meanwhile the impact and the power in his picture is also a evidence showing his great understanding of craftsmanship in photography, that is, to capture the most representative moment from those massive moments in real life. 

Captured German Soldier  in Normandy

Fauvism brief.

Fauvism is an art style usually expressed in painting with  extremely strident color and relatively wild brush works; being the very first movement of modern art in 20th century, the birth of Fauvism came from the inspiration from artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin. The French word "Fauve" represents "wild beasts", which in some way explains the wild, uninhibited brush works and expressive colors used in fauvism painting. Henri Matisse was unquestionably a prominent figure in the development of fauvism; he was a draughtsman and was regarded as a representative figure of French painting, but initially he was considered as a Fauve depending on his work style.

Dance

Self-Portrait by Henri Matisse

Andre Derain is another French painter who is also the co-founder of Fauvism in the early 20th century with Henri Matisse; they worked together in 1905 through a couple of years and he later on shifted from fauvist palette to new classicism, which is a relatively more muted tone.

'Henri Matisse'  portrait by Andre Derain