Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer. Crewdsons images all tell a small story. Every single detail is thought about with his compositions. He treats his process like the set of a movie. Everything is lit specially and manipulated to his vision. His work is theatrical yet quiet and beautiful. Some of his images convey a sense of mystery or sadness. I personally enjoy how big his process becomes and how many people it takes to make the image successful. 

Post by Vanessa Riojas

#11

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism. His use of brightly colored fabrics bring his historical like paintings photos to life. I enjoy that even though you would not normally see a Nigerian man in any of this old time painting photos he places himself in as a major role into the composition. I love his version of Goya's print. His work is playful and interesting

Post by Vanessa Riojas

#10

Mariko Mori

Mariko Mori is a contemporary Japanese video and photographic artist. The theme of most of her work deals with Eastern mythology with Western culture. The juxtaposition between the two make for many interesting images. Mariko Mori poses for many of her own works which ties some of her theme back to her personally. Her use of color is exciting and I really enjoy her choice of wardrobe to make an extra terrestrial feel to her subject. The Japanese culture is very interesting and Mori has an unique way of representing it.

Post By Vanessa Riojas

#9

Atta Kim

"http://www.yossimilo.com/artists/atta_kim/Atta Kim is a South Korean photographer who has been active since the mid-1980s. His early works were black and white portraits of subjects including psychiatric patients, individuals designated as "cultural assets" by the Korean government, and his own family. His later and most notable series of works have been exhibited as full color, large scale prints: The Museum Project, which depicts people "preserved" within plexiglass cases placed in various settings, and ON-AIR, which uses long exposures and image compositing to make individual people and objects dissolve. Kim's work has been heavily influenced by Zen Buddhist concepts of interconnectedness and transience, and he commonly uses Buddhist iconography."
While looking at Atta Kim's work it reminded me of Sarah's and Chri's work from the last critique and might be something that they are interested in looking at. I enjoy the long exposures in his photographs and the compositions are great and guide your eye through the entire image. My favorite body of work from him is the "On-air" series, the colors are great and the mood each image has is consistent. I really enjoy the mall details in the image because of the longer exposures. 

http://www.yossimilo.com/artists/atta_kim/

Chuck Close

Chuck Close was born on July 5, 1940. He is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Close is known for using creative and intricate patterns to portray a human portrait.

I learned about Chuck in history class and what was interesting to me is the amount of detail that he puts into making the paintings seem like a photograph. My favorite piece is the image below, the detail is so amazing that when I first saw it I really did think it was a photograph. Also in the last image you an kind of get an idea of his process on creating some of his portraits. 

http://www.pacegallery.com/artists/80/chuck-close

Idris Khan

"Khan's work draws from a diverse range of cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion to create densely layered imagery that is both abstract and figurative and addresses narratives of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments. Khan’s mindset is more painterly than photographic, he often employs the tools of photomechanical reproduction for create his work. Photographing or scanning from secondary source material sheet music, pages from the Qur’an, reproductions of late Caravaggio paintings, he then builds up the layers of scans digitally, which allows him to meticulously control minute variances in contrast, brightness and opacity." Khan's work is interesting because it reminds me of a dark room print with multiple exposures. Some of them. I enjoy that he mixes many things to create his finished pieces. I enjoy his musical series because it looks like x-rays of the objects and they also remind me of photograms. Also, most of his work has this creepy feeling that it gives off because of the colors and the overlaying of the images. 

http://www.skny.com/artists/idris-khan/bio/

James Craig Annan

The Scottish born artist James Craig Annan was most known for his photogravure work in 1893 at the Photographic Salon. It’s said that the Annan gallery showing in New York was a big influence in
the development of photography in North American. I am most intrigued to Annan's work because in his photgravure work, he combines old printmakingtechniques of intaglio and combines them with photography. The results of his process create work with more textures and more ink for the viewer to gaze upon. Below is a link to some of his work http://www.npg.org.uk/

Francis Meadow Sutcliffe

Francis Meadow Surchliffe was a photographer from England and has been well known for his work documenting the seaside town of Whitiby, England. Francis created a living from portrait photography and his writings about his subjects. His literary works have been prided by the Whitby Literary and Philosophical  Society and are collected there here to this day. I'm most interested in his work because it feels like he did not leave his city to create his images, as if he photographed in the same area his whole life and enjoyed it. Below are a few images that can be found on http://www.sutcliffe-gallery.co.uk/ .

Graciela Iturbide

Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. In 1969 she enrolled at the age of 27 at the film school Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Nacional Autónama de México to become a film director. However she was soon drawn to the art of still photography as practiced by the Mexican modernist master Manuel Alvarez Bravo who was teaching at the University. From 1970-71 she worked as Bravo’s assistant accompanying him on his various photographic journeys throughout Mexico.

 

 

#15 Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Acto Primero, 1975

 Manuel Álvarez Bravo, One of the founders of modern photography, is considered the main representative of Latin American photography in the 20th century. His work extends from the late 1920s to the 1990s.

Álvarez Bravo was born in downtown Mexico City on February 4, 1902. He left school at the age of twelve in order to begin making a contribution to his family’s finances after his father's death. He worked at a textile factory for a time, and later at the National General Treasury.

Both his grandfather (a painter) and his father were amateur photographers. His early discovery of the camera awakened in him an interest that he would continue to cultivate throughout his life. As a self-taught photographer, he would explore many different techniques, as well as graphic art.

Influenced by his study of painting at the Academy of San Carlos, he embraced pictorialism at first. Then, with the discovery of cubism and all the possibilities offered by abstraction, he began to explore modern aesthetics. He had his initiation into documentary photography in 1930: when she was deported from Mexico, Tina Modotti left him her job at the magazine Mexican Folkways. He also worked for the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Portrait of the Eternal, 1935

Álvarez Bravo is an emblematic figure from the period following the Mexican Revolution—often called the Mexican Renaissance. It was a time of a creative fertility, owing to the happy—though not always tranquil—marriage between a desire for modernization and the search for an identity with Mexican roots, in which archaeology, history and ethnology played an important role, parallel to the arts. Álvarez Bravo embodied both tendencies in the field of visual arts.

Between 1943 and 1959, he worked in the film industry doing still shots, which inspired him to realize some of his own experiments with cinema.

A Giving Hand, 1940s

While he was alive, he held over 150 individual exhibitions and participated in over 200 collective exhibitions. According to several critics, the work of this "poet of the lens" expresses the essence of Mexico. However, the humanist regard reflected in his work, the aesthetic, literary and musical references it contains, likewise endow with a truly universal dimension.

He died on October 19, 2002, at the age of one hundred.

The Good Reputation, Sleeping, 1938

"The important thing in a photographer is his work, his sincerity, his ability to transcend the documentary to achieve human fulfillment "

#14 Alfred Stieglitz

Reflection - Venice, c. 1897

A vital force in the development of modern art in America, Alfred Stieglitz's (born 1864, New Jersey—died 1946, New York) significance lies as much in his work as an art dealer, exhibition organizer, publisher, and editor as it does in his career as a photographer. He is credited with spearheading the rise of modern photography in America in the early years of the twentieth century, publishing the periodical Camera Work (1903-17) and forming the exhibition society, the Photo-Secession. He also ran a series of influential galleries, starting with 291, which he used not only to exhibit photography, but also to introduce European modernist painters and sculptors to America and to foster America's own modernist figures - including his later wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. Insistent that photography warranted a place among the fine arts, Stieglitz's own work showed great technical mastery of tone and texture and reveled in exploring atmospherics. In later years, influenced in part by Cubism and other trends, he became interested in straight photography, favoring more clarity and less lush effects.

The Steerage, 1915

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918

When Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe met, in 1915, he was a celebrated photographer who promoted modern art through his publications and galleries and she, 23 years his junior, was just beginning to gain recognition as a painter. A few years later they entered into a passionate affair, and they eventually married in 1924. Stieglitz felt revitalized by the relationship, and in a growing fascination with seriality he produced over 300 photographs of O’Keeffe to form a kind of composite portrait: in front of her paintings, in isolated fragments, and in the intimate poses of a paramour, as seen here. In 1921 Stieglitz exhibited a print of this image at the Anderson Galleries in New York, in a one-person show that included some 40 portraits of O’Keeffe. Years later, when O’Keeffe looked back at the pictures, she remarked, “It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.”

#13 James Nachtwey

Afghanistan, 1986 - Mujahedin praying while on an operation against the soviet union.

James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver.

Kosovo, 1999 - Deportees returned during harvest time.

 In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII.

 He has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, the Palazzo Esposizione in Rome, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Culturgest in Lisbon, El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, the Canon Gallery and the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, the Carolinum in Prague,and the Hasselblad Center in Sweden, among others.

Nicaragua, 1984 - Relic of civil war became a monument in a park.

Rwanda, 1994 - Survivor of Hutu death camp.

"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated."

jamesnachtwey.com 

Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott was an American photographer well known for her photographs of New York architecture and city life in the 1930s. I find her work very appealing and by far she's one of my favorite photographers of all time. Her numerous styles of framing and compositions are displayed in one of her first projects during her documentation of New York's ever changing city. This project was a collection of work for over 6 year without funding. For income, she created commercial work and taught at the New School of Social Research, but luckily she was hired to fund her project by the FAP (Federal Art Project). Below are a few of my favorite photos by Berenice Abbot; 

www.commercegraphics.com