Edward Burtynsky [1995-]

Burtynskys view in his words

“Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.”

“These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

Famous works

Some of his more so famous works are:
· Breaking ground
· Quarries
· Urban Mines
· Ships
· Oil
· Three Gorges and,
· China

Edward Burtynsky was born febuary 22nd 1955 in St. Catherines, Ontario.He received a diploma for graphic arts, at Niagra College, in Welland Ontario, and took B.A.A., Photographic Arts, in Ryerson Polytechnichnical University, in Toronto Ontario. In the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario holds a catalog of his (2003); and has been through various institutions across North America. He has work in in the collections of the Bibliotheque National in Paris and France; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the museum of modern Art in New York; The los Angeles County Museum in New; the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego; and the San

My sources:

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

http://www.cowlesgallery.com/Burtynsky.html

http://www.cowlesgallery.com/biographies/BURTYNSKYbio.html

http://www.cowlesgallery.com/burtynsky/shipbreaking.html

Two links to pictures:

http://www.artnet.com/.../burtynsky%20photo%20sm.jpg

http://www.the-artists.org/Images/burtynsky.jpg

Photojournalism

In this assignment you will select an event or issue from the 20th or 21st century (unions, the Olympic bombing, communism, prohibition, healthcare etc..)

Collect images that support multiple perspectives of that event. Try to be as diverse as possible. Look for aesthetically strong images from a variety of sources. Collect a minimum of 15 strong images.

Using your five strongest images create a blog post about your topic. Please be use to use all original text. Explain your choice of images in detail.

A few excellent photojournalism sources:
Reuters http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures
Magnum http://www.magnumphotos.com
Associated Press http://www.ap.org/pages/product/photoservices.html
Contact Press Images http://www.contactpressimages.com/

Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget was a famous photographer that dedicated his life to take pictures of the city Paris for thirty years. Eugene Atget was born in Bordeaux in eighteen-fifty-six. His uncle brought him up because he was an orphan. At an early age Eugene Atget was shipped out to sea working as a cabin boy. After he finished being a cabin boy he decided he wanted to be an actor. He got a few jobs acting usually playing the role of a villain because his physical appearance made it suite him.

After a little while he found that acting was not rewarding enough for himself and turned to art and painting. When he didn't exceed in that he turned to photography. Assuming he had experience in drama, observations and travel, his main goal was to photograph the monuments of Paris like: sites, houses, streets, chateaux and subjects about to disappear. He then found that he was not getting any more rewarding in photography then in acting, but he stuck to taking photos and soon got some recognition for some of his work .

Eugene Atget started selling his work, but when World War Two started in 1914 Atget was afraid of it and people started assuming he was a spy or a lunatic. Atget then stopped selling his photographs (which was a tragedy because his photos are so meaningful). When Eugene Atget died in 1927 he got little understanding of his work and little recognition of it, the archives of the Palais Royale bought some of his plates for their record value but at very low prices. In a way Eugene Atget didn't express himself to the public understanding and was forgotten.

Even though Eugene Atget was forgotten about after he died, he is now seen as a brilliant artist photographer. His pictures teach us a lot about Paris but they can also teach us about composition rules and moods.

My favorite picture by Eugene Atget is:

(couldn't put on my post) The URL for the Image is http://www.eastman.org/fm/atget/htmlsrc/m197601090009_ful.html#topofimage

What I like about this picture is the diminishing perspective.

My other pictures URL is http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/atget/atget_coin_full.html


(sorry about the inconvenience if you have any questions just ask me!?!


Links:

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/atget/atget.html

http://www.eastman.org/fm/atget/htmlsrc/index.html

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

“Migrant Mother”




Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer with a lot of influence. She studied photography at the Columbia University in New York City. Her teacher was Clarence H. White. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a very successful portrait studio. With the Great Depression (1930’s) she started to change her picture-motives from the studio to the street. She and her husband Maynard Dixon decided to travel and they took pictures of native people.
In 1935 she divorced from her first husband and married Paul Schuster Taylor, who was responsible for most of Lange’s education in social and political matters. The both started to work together. They documented poverty and migrant laborers. Her husband was interviewing and collecting economic data, Lange was taking the pictures.
Her pictures had success and they brought attention to the problems of the population (displaced farm families, migrant workers, and sharecroppers (sharecropping: landowners allow using land but in return they want to share the crop that was produced on the land)).
Lange’s most famous picture is “Migrant Mother” (picture at the top). It was taken in Nipomo, California, March 1938 and it shows a woman with a child whose sons went to get help for their broken car.
All in all, Lange photographed the development of ethnic groups and workers during the Great Depression.

During World War II Dorothea Lange documented the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps and then she turned her objective on women and members of minority groups.But her work wasn’t be seen by a bigger part of the population until 1972 when the Whitney Museum displayed 27 of her photographs in "Executive Order 9066". A reporter from the New York Times (A.D. Coleman) called her pictures: “documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime."
Lange traveled a lot during the 1950’s and 1960’s. She was in Vietnam, Ireland, Pakistan and India, and she was writing many photographic essays for Life magazine. Lange’s pictures were printed in books and displayed in museums, the most in the Oakland Museum of California. She said about herself not to be an artist but she said of her own work: “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…But I have only touched it, just touched it.”


My sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Dorothea_Lange.html


Two links to her pictures:
http://artseal.citysearch.com/page/15klg/Figurative__Portraiture__amp__Special_Exhibits/Dorothea_Lange.html
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_fotografi/index.php?lang=en&author=lange

by Franziska Bandow

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus

Born Diane Nemerov in New York city Diane Arbus grew up in a rich jewish family. At the age of 14 she met and fell in love with Allan Arbus; marrying him at the age of 18.

While Allan was training as a photographer for the U.S Army he shared his lessons with his wife, Diane. With thier skills the couple became very popular in the fashion indusry; Allan taking the photograhs and Diane styling the shoots. Diane took more formal photography lessons with Lisette Model and the New School in New York and soon landed a job as a photojournalist. In her earlyer work she shot with a 35mm camera but soon adopted a Rolleiflex medium format twin-lens reflex.

By 1963 after three years of extensive photojournaling and her photographs getting in some popular magazines (Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, and Sunday Times Magazine) she recived a guggenheim Fellow grant to she could take time off work and focus on her art photography. She also taught photography at Parsons School of Design, NYC and Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

In July of 1971 Diane Arbus commited suicide at the age of 48. She overdosed on Barbiturates and slit her wrists.

Her photography is about individuality. She liked shooting the outsiders. Transvestites, dwarvs, giants, prostitutes or "ordinary people in disturbing settings" or poses are not out of the "norm" in her images.

Alexander Rodchenko

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (December 5, 1891- December 3, 1956) was one of the world's most versatile artists, dabbling in the fields of graphic design, painting, sculpting, furniture design, book covers, movie posters, billboards, and photography. His photography was innovative and original. He is famous for shooting his subjects from odd angles to shock the viewer, and for employing the use of lines in his photography. He once said "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

He studied at the Kazan School of Art under Nikolai Feshin and Georgii Medvedev between 1910 and 1914. He was later appointed Director of the Museum Bureau and Purchasing Fund by the Bolshevik Government in 1920, and taught from 1920 to 1930 at the Higher Technical-Artistic Studios. He soon abandoned painting in order to concentrate on graphic design for posters, books, and films. He was greatly influenced by the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, with whom he worked intensivly in 1922.

Throughout the 1920s Rodchenko's work was increasingly abstract, and his art was concentrated on photomontages, which he used on book covers and posters. He exclusively used unoriginal photographs in his photomontages until 1924, when it became increasingly difficult for him to find suitable photographs. He soon turned all of his concentration on photography, shooting ordinary objects at unusual perspectives. Many of his photographs incorporated the use of lines and other geometric shapes and patterns, including stairs, grids, city streets, and overhead wires. He returned to painting in the late 1930's, stopped photographing in 1942, and produced abstract expressionist works in the 1940's.

Rodchenko had been a supporter of the Soviet revolution, and his photography was intended to support and encourage social change. However, from around 1928 on, with the rise of Stalinism, his work was heavily criticized and was the subject of many political attacks for its 'bourgeois formalism', mainly because of his use of tilted camera angles. Rodchenko was lucky to avoid imprisonment or death, but the last twenty years of his life were spent in poverty and obscurity.

Much of 20th century graphic design was influenced by the work of Alexsander Rodchenko. His graphic design is so influential that to pick out particular designers he has influenced would be pointless.

Galleries:

http://www.left.ru/2001/3/rodchenko/r17.html

http://www.mdf.ru/festivals/fashion_style/2005/rodchenkocircle_fs05/

Gregory Crewdson

Born in the neighbourhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, Gregory Crewdson came into the world in 1962 on September 26. He wasn't always an aspiring photographer, during his teenaged years he became a member in a punk rock group called The Speedies that sold out rock shows all over town. Their hit song, "Let Me Take Your Foto" was used by Hewlett Packard for their digital camera commercials in 2005. Being a world famous rocker was not to be his destiny however; he decided to move on from music to study photography at State University of New York at Purchase. He would later acquire his Master in Fine Arts from Yale University and later teach at Sarah Lawrance, Cooper Union, Vassar Colege and Yale University to where he is currently situated since 1993.

His general underlying theme for most of his photographic works seem be that of fear, anxiety, and isolation. The sets used to capture some of the pictures that are taken by this man are very, very, elaborate and complex that seems to give every inch of the frame filled. The pictures seemed to have a sense of loss and hopelessness that seems to raise more questions than answers.

It is an interesting notion that such a seemingly ordinary and plain man such a Gregory Crewdson can produce such deep and thought-provoking portrayals of reality and at times fantasy. He has produced many works in very short amounts of time, especially in 2001 when dozens of astonishing photos were captured. This man appears to be born with a gift, a gift that has done him wonders and created just as many. He is expected to produce dozens if not more of fantastic and interesting works for many years to come.