Independant Project

We are spending the last few weeks before the senior art show working on independent projects. I am going to be working on a very conceptual project that I hope will turn out but I don't actually know if it will. I plan on taking three to five landscape images, printing out 3 copies of each image on a matte paper. Then, I will bury the copies where I took the image, keep them each buried for a different amount of time(3 days, 7 days, 12 days) with the hope that they will all achieve a different level of decomposition. Once all the images are unburied, I will mount them and hopefully they will be shown in the art show at the end of May. 

I got the idea of trying to decompose and naturally destroy my images fro the portraits of Seung-Hwan Oh. He did not bury his images to mutilate them, he purposefully applied chemicals to them and achieved very cool surrealistic affect that I hope to achieve. 

Seung-Hwan Oh

Seung-Hwan Oh

High Key Low Key Flowers

I have shot for my high and low key flag book. My subject matter was of flowers. To achieve the drastically high and low key qualities of the images I edited them through lightroom. In addition, I shot the high key images on a light board and the low key images on a piece of black fabric in somewhat dim lighting. Here are the final images I plan on working with. 

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in 1908 in France. Bresson really began his artistic career in 1927 when he entered the private art school Lhote Academy to study painting, which he later described as "photography without a camera". After his time at the Lhote Academy Bresson went on to become the master of candid street photography. He was heavily influenced by surrealist painters and his formal artistic training could be seen in his photographs through his masterful composition and careful technique. His photography took him all over the world and eventually to be the first western photographer to "freely" shoot in post-war soviet union.

I think that this is an excellent example of Cartier-Bresson's photographic style. His beautiful and careful composition shown through his use of the lines of the stairs and railing in addition the the interesting perspective. However, he also catches the perfect split-second moment of the biker moving on the street below. 

Flag Books

For our flag book assignment, I plan on having two rows of six images. I am planning on all of the images being flowers. One of the image sets(rows) will be high key images taken of flowers on the light box. The other set will be low key images of flowers on a black background and I would use a flash to make the flower colors pop. Below are some high/low key images that I hope to emulate.

Ying Gao

Ron Van Dongen

Leslie Avon Miller

Billy Kid

Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz was born in 1864 and died in 1946. He lived and worked primarily in New York and was married to the painter Georgia O'Keefe. In 1896 he joined the New York Camera Club and the Society of Amateur Photographers in New York to create the Camera Club of New York. The Camera Club of New York is only one of many efforts Stieglitz took to make photography a commonly accepted. Stieglitz's contribution to the world of photography was not just shooting beautiful and inspirational images but also convincing the art world of New York that photography is a legitimate art form. In terms of his own artwork, Stieglitz subject matter mostly consisted of portraiture of the important people in his life as well as many city-scapes, including his first print to win an award The Last Joke, Bellagio. Many of his photographs seemed to be heavily influenced by impressionist painters. To many of those in the photography world, Stieglitz is known as the "godfather of modern photography" not only because of the contribution of his own art, but also because of his work to have photography an accepted art form in art world.

In many of the city-scapes that I see, it is just an image of the interesting architecture in the area or an interesting yet seemingly random street scene. What I love about this image is that it seems to catch the essence and the personality of a rainy New York day. 

Self Portraits

During the research time for our self portrait assignment, I found myself looking at a lot of methods to alter your images physically and not digitally to make them a bit more interesting. The method I found myself most attracted to and interested in was embroidering on my photographs. Below, there are examples of embroidered photographs as well as the self portraits I plan on embroidering on. 

Jose Romussi

Maurizio Anzeri

The two main artists I found inspiration from were Maurizio Anzeri and Jose Romussi. Both use very linear, clean designs which I find very appealing. Additionally, they don't embroider over the whole picture, they leave some parts naked which I like. The images they sew on are very basic, classic portraits without too much else going on the image seeing as the embroidery and the person are suppose to be the main subjects. I kept that in mind when shooting my own. 

Starbooks

With the start of the new semester, we are diving into book making and book binding. Our first project is a classic self portrait, a more metaphorical self portrait and a third self portrait, presented through a starbook. The starbook portrait is not suppose to be a series of images of ourselves but rather a series of images of things and people who make us who we are.
I plan on making two books, one for my family and one for my friends.
Below are some examples of starbooks, neither have photos in them but they use techniques that I am interested in incorporating into my books.

This starbook was made by Lynette Collis in November of 2014, I found it on her blog, lynettecollis.blogspot.com. I really like how she used stickers and how there is an obvious and cohesive color scheme throughout the pages. It's a little too "scrapbooky" for my style, but I like the embellishments to the pages. 

This starbook is called Stand and Stare, 2012 by Anne Stinner. This starbook is much more complicated and complex than what I plan on doing but I like the ram frame. It would be very interesting to try framing my pictures. 

Can a photograph incite change?

Yes, I believe an photograph can inspire change. I believe that a photograph can incite change much easier than an article or a paper, because it has been said before and I will say it again now, one photograph can say a thousand words. Unfortunately, even though it is much easier for a photograph to effect change than written text, they both suffer the short attention span of people in the 21st century. While an image may inspire some large number of people to do something, in a week or less, that number of the inspired people will no longer be interested and will have moved onto the next big issue. While I do believe that an image can inspire change, I don't believe that it is possible for an image to really effect change. Perhaps a series of images of an atrocity given to the public over a period of time could do something because the people would stay interested, but there have not been many if any images that have worked like that.

This image was taken by Nick Ut in 1972. It was shot during the Vietnam War after a South Vietnamese Skyraider had torched her village with napalm. The naked girl running away is Phan Thi Kim Phuc, she had pulled all of her clothes off because they were on fire. You can't see her burns in this picture but she still carries the scars today and suffers from severe nerve damage. This image became an iconic symbol for the the people who disagreed with the Vietnam War. 

This image absolutely makes you feel something and I am sure it effected the way people viewed the war but I do not believe it ultimately did anything to really change anything that wasn't already being done.

Margaret Bourke-White

Margaret Bourke-White was born in Bronx, NY in 1904, the daughter of a naturalist and a homemaker. In 1926 she attended Cornell University and emerged from there as a strong woman destined to pioneer and reinvent what it meant to be a professional photographer. Bourke-White specialized in documenting the rise of industry in both the US and was the first photographer to document industry in Soviet Russia after the revolution. In addition many her photographs sent a very political and sometimes satirical message to the public.  She went on to have an incredibly successful career at LIFE(run by the same publishing company as TIME magazine) magazine, including having her photo of the enormous chain of dams in the Colombia River be the first ever photograph to be on LIFE's cover. Margaret Bourke-White died of Parkinson's Disease in 1971.

Margaret Bourke-White, Steel Liners, 1936, Gelatin Silver print

What I find very appealing about this image and all of Bourke-White's industry photography, is the organic looking beauty found in completely unnatural man-made things. Personally, I am drawn to images that show natural beauty and the industrial revolution is one of the most unnatural things that our country has gone through. In this image, Bourke-White manages to capture my favored aesthetic of natural beauty in something deeply unnatural. On the more technical side of things, I love the composition of the image, the use of lines and shape as well as the very pleasing range of colors.

Fine Food Art?

After researching and experimenting with both fine art and commercial food photography, I have developed a collection of artwork for both categories. You can find a link to my "food blog" that has my commercial photos here and their are examples of my fine art food photography below.

For this image I decided to try and take the idea of fine art food photography in it's more traditional sense. Photography a piece of food not necessarily to show it's "foodiness" but to capture it in an original and more abstract way. This is a head of broccoli.

For this image I tried to take the idea of fine art food photography in a more comedic direction. I took a banana and using a this knife, poked a replication of Edvard Munch's The Scream into a banana. I took what is considered "fine art" by the majority of the public and literally put it onto a food. 

Jazz Posters

This February we(the photography class) are partnering with the graphic design class to create a poster for the 2016 Portland Jazz Festival. For my images, I am hoping to steer clear of pictures of instruments because I think they are far too over done. I hope to capture the idea and feeling of "jazz" through images of people and some nature/landscape images. Here are some jazz posters that inspire me for this project. Some of them do include instruments but I like the overall feel they give which is why I chose to include them in this. 

2012 Gaume Jazz Festival

Claire Danes record cover

New Orleans Jazz festival 2013

Fickle Foods

Check out our food blog here!
Completed!!

Commercial vs. Fine Art Food Photography

Fine Art Food:
Fine art food photography is about showing the beauty and highlighting the interesting things in(usually), one piece of food. For instance, the roots of beets, veins in cabbage, lines on a carrot, etc. Fine art food photography is less about making the food appear appetizing per say, but more about making a piece of food look beautiful.

Fred Michel

Commercial Food Photography:

While fine art food photography is meant to show the beauty in a single piece of food by looking at its details, commercial food photography is about taking a whole dish, and making it look appealing and appetizing, making the audience want to eat it. Commercial images can and should still be beautiful but it's less about honing in on the fine little details and more about about the overall presentation of a dish. 

"Jen"
http://www.tartineandapronstrings.com/