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.