Torkel Korling

Korling’s portrayal of children, in their own homes rather than in the studio, with his Graflex fitted with his automatic diaphragm and multiple flash units for lighting were noted in a number of articles as ‘natural’ and unselfconscious  and were promoted by the Graflex company in their advertising. His photograph of his son Peter’s hand in his was seen widely as used in an insurance promotions that won the 1937 National Advertising Award.

Having devised an apple-picking device in his youth, in 1933 Korling invented and patented for Graflex camera corporation an automatic aperture control that enabled full-aperture viewing for accurate focus, closing to the pre-selected aperture opening when the shutter was fired and simultaneously synchronising the firing of a flash unit.  It was the forerunner of a feature adopted on 35mm single-lens reflex cameras from the late fifties. He also patented portable, collapsible tripods with extendable leg braces for stability which he updated in 1943.

A logging company in Wisconsin hired Korling to take pictures of landholdings it planned to sell. A Chicago magazine editor hired him in 1926 to take pictures of the city and Korling moved there. A friend encouraged Korling to show his pictures to a Chicago ad agency art director, and his career as a commercial photographer was launched. From the 1920s through the 1950s Korling was extensively published in Fortune and Life magazines and did annual reports for major companies; Container Corporation of America, Dow Chemical, and Standard Oil of California. His shot of business executives meeting in a boardroom of modern design was chosen by Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man which was seen by 9 million visitors. From the late 1940s to 1962 he was granted access to RR Donnelley's Chicago and Crawfordsville facilities, producing more than 300 images for them at a time when the company carefully guarded its innovations.  He was favoured for his ability in staging and capturing the essential steps in manufacturing processes, often in the one image, since he rarely made more than one shot at each location. At the same time as being documentary, Korling's Donnelly images are modernist in their composition, treatment of surface, and lighting. In making his architectural photographs Korling never cropped his pictures and relied on available light whenever possible.

Torkel Korling (April 24, 1903 – October 22, 1998) was a Swedish-born American industrial, commercial, portrait and botanical photographer.