discourse

Gerhard Richter

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:04:54 +0000

German photographer Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany. Richter met and began to work with influential artists such as Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer-Lueg and Georg Baselitz in the 1960′s. Their work started to have an impact in Germany. Richter’s art was not about beauty and purity, he painted the reality that he saw every day. He had his first exhibition in Dusseldorf in 1963 where his new refreshing style of mixed media art work caught the eye of many of its viewers. His images are quite surreal and nostalgic.

His photographs mixed with paint are quite unusual. If the photograph had been left as it was most of them would seem very snapshot and almost boring, but with Richter’s added creative touch the photograph becomes more powerful and thought provoking.

Robert Frank

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:02:40 +0000

Swiss born photographer Robert Frank was born in 1924. He turned to photography during world war two as a means of expressing himself and to step away from his reality of fearing the nazi invasions at the time. He emigrated to the United States in 1947 were he worked as a fashion photographer in New York a job which he left to travel south america and Europe. His most famous piece of work is entitled ‘The Americans’ and documents the 1958 post-war period. His photographs give the viewpoint of a foreigner in America during this time. For this project he took over 28,000 shots and travelled the country for two years with his family in tow. Out of the 28,000 pictures only 83 of them where selected to be published in the book.

Nan Goldin

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:51:18 +0000

Nan Goldin was born in 1953 in Washington D.C. When she was 18 years old she started to document the lives of her extended family. Her work is very candid and sometimes appears amateurish but to me, if I look closely I can interoperate deeper meanings in her photographs which I like very much. I love how she manages to produce snapshot style images but yet still manages to make them artistic and professional. She has managed to get up close and personal with her subjects capturing some of their most intimate moments, which makes her work highly interesting and gives an honest depiction of her life and her surroundings. Although Nan Goldin claims that her photographs aren’t posed in anyway some of the compositions in the pictures seem too coincidental and too well composed to be taken on the spur of the moment.

Her work is very gritty and doesn’t try to mask anything which I really like.

Bill Brandt

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:38:34 +0000

Bill Brandt is a very diverse photographer, he has explored all the major genres in photography such as landscape, photojournalism, nudes and portraits.

I really enjoy the grittiness of his images, the way he has captured the moment perfectly. I like his documentary style images the most, I find them very honest and it is hard to imagine there is a photographer there at all, it really appears as though we are looking directly into the scene. I also found some of his nude portraits quite surreal. The way he has composed some of them is rather odd but at the same time aesthetically pleasing which I think is a good combination of contrasts.

Gregory Crewdson

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:31:02 +0000

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who live and works in New York City. I looked at his book ‘Twilight’ and I found that I really liked the pictures although it is not usually the type of photography that attracts me. I found his images quite eerie and mystical, and most of the figures in the pictures reminded me of zombies. They are very detached, not interacting with the photographer and very much in a world of their own. The actual scenes of some of the pictures are really surreal. He has set them up to look like everyday scenes but added an eerie twist to it, I think the fact that he shot the pictures in twilight really adds to this effect.

I particularly like the above image. I think it is quite creepy and disturbing in one way but it also could be an every day image of a child fallen asleep whilst doing homework, the mother watching TV and the father checking on them whilst in the garden, but somehow it doesn’t portray that at all. To me I see the child and woman look like they have been drugged and their captor is peering at his prey through the window.

Alex Majoli

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:18:21 +0000

Alex Majoli is an italian photographer born in 1971. He documented the closing of an asylum in the Greek island of Leros in 1994. I think he was trying to document the horrific conditions that these people were made to live in, however, I don’t think he did the breaking down the stigma surrounding mental illness any justice. Although I can’t deny that these are honest portraits, he has not included any pictures were the patients appear calm and relaxed, I think this was a choice made by the photographer to purposefully make the situation look worse than it was. I find the images in the book quite upsetting, seeing how these people were treated, how many patients were kept in the same room day after day, guarded away from society and deemed ‘incurable’. I did like Majoli’s style of photography, the high contrasted black and white images were really bold and eye catching but his photographs are very one sided and only highlight the most disturbing points of mental illness.

Jonas Bendiksen

miedoescenico — Fri, 22 May 2009 09:03:02 +0000

in Jonas Bendiksen’s book ‘The Places We Live’ he explores some of the poorest places in the world. He took pictures of the people living there, and also inside their homes. When you look at these pictures it is quite gut wrenching to see how some of these people live. Some people have made a room big enough for a family to live in just from old cardboard boxes and some stickers and duck tape. However, in most of the pictures the people do not look sad or ungrateful for their lodgings, in fact quite the opposite, they almost seem proud of their make-shift homes and look very welcoming. I think Bendiksen has really captured the essence of poverty in his photographs and they really are quite striking images.

Lucky S. Michaels

miedoescenico — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:01:09 +0000

Lucky S. Michaels is an American photographer. Throughout his childhood he was surrounded by drug abusers and his family became homeless. His work strongly reflects on his upbringing, it shows a true depiction of his life. I have read his book ‘Shelter’. I thought it was a really inspiring piece of work. The images are taken in ‘Silvia’s Place’, a homeless shelter in New York City. He began photographing the people who walked through the doors every night and struck up friendships with many of them. The above image is one of my favourites from the book. The blood on her face looks like tears, I think the blood dripping down her face makes the image more powerful, literally like she is crying blood. Although there is not much emotion in her face the photographer has managed to capture her sadness.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

miedoescenico — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:44:50 +0000

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were the editors of Colors magazine. It was the first photography magazine to really tackle political thought provoking issues. I have looked through their book ‘Ghetto’ and I really found it interesting. I especially liked the portraits they did in the psychiatric hospitals. I think their work is honest and meaningful and they have photographed the patients with dignity, they also gave the patients a chance to have their say and talk about their experiences which accompanies the photographs really well. I also liked the images taken in a prison, I thought they were very vivid and eye opening and they kind of slowed down the whole scene so you can take everything in and gives an honest perspective of the prison life.

Core Subjects

miedoescenico — Sat, 16 May 2009 23:31:29 +0000

SEMIOTICS -

Semiotics are signs and images that have obtained meaning through, historical, cultural and social processes. The image or sign portrays a meaning without the use of words, it is when a sign provokes an emotion within the viewer. Semiotics can be applied to most things. Advertising is full of semiotics, how the companies want to promote their project hugely relies on this theory. How do they want their project to be seen? Who is their target audience? The colours used, the type of clothes the actors wear, nothing is left to chance, everything is carefully organised and specifically chosen.

However not all signs and symbols work universally,

This HSBC advert demonstrates this. Different things have different meanings all over the world, semiotics is very particularly related to cultural and social aspects, how people perceive things in their culture can be completely different to how other societies view the same symbol.

FEMINISM-

Feminism is a movement to bring equal rights to both sexes. Female rights vary throughout the world according to society and culture. Throughout history men have always been perceived as the more powerful gender and placed at the top of the social pyramid. Society is very complex and even today women face discrimination in some societies purely because of their sex. Why are some professions male orientated? and others for females?

Feminist art reflects on women’s lives and experiences. It was founded to bring more publicity to woman artists and their work in a male dominated society. The guerrilla Girls started to highlight sexism, racism and corruption through art. The group started in 1985 and consisted of anonymous woman artists who adopted the names of famous dead female artists as a disguise. They wear gorilla masks in public to conceal their identities. The produced witty billboards and posters to make feminism more approachable and accepted.

POST MODERNISM-

Post modernism refers to the period of time after the modernism periods where artists were thought to have develop the ideas of this theory further. It involved art work like installation art and conceptual art. Marcel Duchamp once exhibited a urinal and claimed that anything can be made into art if you put it in a gallery. In 1917 this approach to art was unheard of and shocking. Artists such as Jackson Pollack redefined the way in which art was perceived and how artists work. His work was very free, abstract and impressionable. He pushed the boundaries of peoples ideas of art and what art could be.