Amy E's BLOG: May 2011

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Chris Verene

Richard Misrach American photographer, best known for his ‘nuclear landscapes’ shot in the Nevada desert, and for technical experimentation in photographing plants, water, and the nocturnal environment of the American West. Typically, pictures are large and colours slightly muted, underlining the scale and desolation of the landscape within which a presence, for instance, dead animals, or an event, such as smoke, has summoned attention. Impact emerges from tension between pictorial beauty and the destruction often implied by what is pictured. His work method is solitary; days at a time spent in a van reading, waiting for something to happen, sometimes accompanied by his wife Miriam, author of several essays on his work. He stresses pure photographic communication, and in 1979 published A Photographic Book which is entirely wordless. Now, captions are limited to statements of place and date. The influence of American formalism, associated with landscape photography of the West, is marked. The operatic title for his 1999 retrospective exhibition, Desert Cantos, emphasizes the poetics of the imagery. His recent work includes recordings of the movement of light on the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, where he lives.

Richard Misrach had a fantastic way of catching images in their natural settings. The perspective that he encaptures in his photos make you want to really look at the photos to make sure what you think that you are seeing is really what you are seeing. In the photo of the gate and fence in the water you really have to look to see where the gate and fenece begin and where the water is this picture also has an optical illusion to it. The photo of the blue rocks is so inspiring to me that I now want this pattern on my bathroom wall.

In his series Camera Club (1995-1997), Chris Verene employs his camera furtively, but without entirely concealing it from view. Verene infiltrated the world of “camera clubs,” groups of men who lure young women into modeling nude or seminude by placing classified ads in newspapers and pretending to be professional fashion photographers. He posed as a camera club photographer, joined the group and played the part, but then turned his camera on the photographers themselves. By positioning himself behind the men and pretending to be tinkering with his camera – loading his film, testing his flash – Verene could easily release his shutter without arousing the suspicion of his already distracted colleagues.

The resulting pictures telescope the usual photographer’s gaze and emphasize the predatory nature of photography. Verene’s compositions mirror the power dynamics of the situation: the men’s backs, hairy legs, and balding heads dominate the picture plane and their lurching posture reveals their avidity. In contrast, the women in the background are small in scale; Verene protects their identities by keeping them generally out of focus.

For almost 20 years, Verene has photographed his hometown of Galesburg, a small working class railroad town in western Illinois. In these pictures Verene documents with dignity and a wry sense of humor both joyful events, like a cousin’s wedding, and the hardships of poverty, divorce, and death. Other projects include a continuation of the Camera Club series, the Self-Esteem Salon. A performance oriented project Verene coined as a public response to the Camera Club images, the Self-Esteem Salon involves a series of “therapeutic portrait sessions” geared towards models in need of a fresh look or makeover.

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Chris Verene was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. He received a BA from Emory University and an MFA from Georgia State University. In addition to being a photographer, Verene is also a performance artist and musician in the indie rock band Cordero. His works have been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and in Times Square, New York. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Whitney Museum and the High Museum. Verene currently lives and works in New York where he is an adjunct Professor of MFA Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Art.

Chris Verene takes unique and unusual photos of ordinary life. Some of his photos almost seem like they could come from my own faimly album. Look at the lady driving that brown car I swear it could be me and my two kids. But there does seem to be another side to Chris's photos like the one of the two nurses in the red room, unique but more artistic and almost scary. I think of the movie the stand when I see this photo red rum. X-files exposed in the photo of the person in the plastic bag or is it a play on birth.

Anne Geddes

Born and raised in Queensland, Australia, Anne Geddes has always been interested in the strength that a photographic image could hold. In her mid-twenties, she began experimenting with the family camera, developing her signature style of simple structure and immediate visual impact.

One of the world's most respected and successful professional photographers, Anne has captured the imagination and hearts of people around the globe. Her distinctive, award-winning images of children have become classic icons celebrating life and birth. They grace greeting cards, calendars, books, stationery, photo albums, and an array of other fine products, and are currently published in over 50 countries, spanning North America, Europe, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Asia. More than 13 million books plus many more millions of other non-book products have been sold worldwide.

In November 2001 Anne's Baby Clothing Collection was launched exclusively online. At the heart of Anne's success is her deep and abiding love of children. Her images have become classic icons celebrating birth and life.

Anne Geddes takes photos of babies like no one else does. She has an imaginary way of seeing the babies for their charaters and putting them into different costumes and positions to achieve her imagined desire. One sometimes has to look hard at the photos to notice where and if the baby is even in the picture. Everytime I see one of her photos it makes me happy and smile. Oh what a cute baby.

Sally Mann

American photographer, best known for photographs of her three children, often naked, dirty, or wounded, in poses that suggest their precocious sexuality. Her first widely recognized body of work, At Twelve (1988), similarly portrayed just‐pubescent girls. Later work explored landscapes of the American South, especially the Blue Ridge Mountains in south‐western Virginia where she was born, grew up, and lives.
Mann's black‐and‐white photographs are made with a large‐format view camera, and thoughtfully and skilfully printed. She has also worked in platinum, Polaroid, and Cibachrome. Her images are generally large and, issued in extremely limited editions, have enjoyed great success both critically and commercially.

In the late 1980s, the widely exhibited family photographs eventually published in Immediate Family (1992) and Still Time (1994) were attacked as perverse and exploitative, or praised as innocent and beautiful, depending on the political stance of the viewer.
Mann's landscape work is strongly influenced by pictorialism. Appearing less controlled and more flawed than the images of her children, the prints are purposely made with damaged lenses to exaggerate irregularities of focus and evoke historical photography. All her work has a literary character, and embodies nostalgia for innocence lost or under threat. She has also participated in group commission projects that reflect her values and interests, producing images of the Calakmul Biosphere in Mexico for the Nature Conservancy's Last Great Places exhibition (2001), and untitled images of windows made from the perspective of the dying for Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry (1996).

Sally Mann is very bold and I admire her for taking photos of her children as they are natural and beautiful. She also happens to play delightfully with light and shadow and depth of field to make the viewer see what she wants them to see. I also enjoy that her work involves her children, which I too try to envolve my children into my work. Her photos have a timeless look to them as those you are either looking at photos from long ago or photos taken last week. The photo of the child's head in the sand reminds my of paintngs that I have seen of the greek mythical creature Medusa.

Robert Glenn Ketchum

In the centennial edition, Audubon magazine editors recognized 100 champions of conservation “who shaped the environmental movement in the 20th century.” Included with such luminaries as John Muir, Rachael Carson and David Brower, was photographer, Robert Glenn Ketchum. Ketchum has also been listed by American Photo as one of the 100 most important people in photography. In the past two years he has been given the Robert O. Easton Award for Environmental Stewardship, the Josephine and Frank Duveneck Humanitarian Award, and has been named Outstanding Photographer of the Year for 2001 by the North American Nature Photography Association, and Outstanding Person of the Year by Photo Media magazine. The diversity of these acknowledgments reflect a unique 30-year career in which Ketchum has dedicated his art to addressing issues of natural resource management and habitat protection. Combined with his personal activism, he and his work have been at the forefront of American artists expressing their concern for the state of the environment, and Ketchum has had remarkable success.

Author of 10 publications, including Overlooked In America: The Success and Failure of American Land Management and American Photographers and The National Parks as well as a contributor to Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry and Tatshenshini River Wild, Ketchum has combined his publications with stunning printwork, target-specific exhibitions, lectures and direct lobbying to help establish wilderness lands, enhance national parks and further campaigns to preserve imperiled ecosystems. His book The Tongass: Alaska’s Vanishing Rain Forest has been credited with helping to pass the significant Tongass Timber Reform Legislation. For this he was given the United Nations Outstanding Environmental Achievement Award. He has also received the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography, the Chevron-Times Mirror Magazines Conservation Award, and the UCLA Alumni Award for Excellence in Professional Achievement.

His work is represented in most of the major museum collections in the United States. Since 1968, he has had over 500 one-man and group shows worldwide. In 1979, he was one of twelve photographers invited to participate in the first photography exhibition ever held in The White House and, in June of 1992, he was given a one-man exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, representing American art at the UNCED/ “Earth Summit” Conference. In addition to his photography and writing, Ketchum is a founder and on the Board of Directors of Advocacy Arts Foundation. He is also a Trustee of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, and sits on the Board of Councilors of American Land Conservancy, and the Board of Directors of the Environmental Communications Office (ECO). He was previously Curator of Photography for the National Park Foundation for fifteen years. In the fall of 2002, Aperture released his most recent book, Rivers of Life: Southwest Alaska, the Last Great Salmon Fishery.

Robert Glenn Ketchum has taking beautiful nature picture really down to an art. I have never before seen photos of rivers, trees, and land taking with so much love and respect as I see in the photos that Robert takes. These photos make me want to run outside and just start taking picture of the world around me, they also make me want to go to the beach I miss boogie boarding so much. The photo of the surfer reminds me of my dad surfing and my trip to Hawii. Go green and don't forget to recycle.

Richard Misrach

Chris Verene

Annie Leibovitz

Photographer. Born Anna-Lou Leibovitz, on October 2, 1949, in Westbury, Connecticut. She was one of the six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. In 1967, Leibovitz enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, where (although initially studying painting) she developed a love for photography.

After living briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, Leibovitz returned to the U.S., in 1970, and applied for a job with the start-up rock music magazine Rolling Stone. Impressed with Leibovitz’s portfolio, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer. Within two years, the 23-year-old Leibovitz was promoted to chief photographer—a title she would hold for the next 10 years. Her position with the magazine afforded her the opportunity to accompany the Rolling Stones band on their 1975 international tour.

While with Rolling Stone, Leibovitz developed her trademark technique, which involved the use of bold primary colors and surprising poses. Wenner has credited her with making many Rolling Stone covers collector's items, most notably an issue that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz’s photo of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death.

In 1983, Leibovitz left Rolling Stone and began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair. With a wider array of subjects, Leibovitz’s photographs for Vanity Fair ranged from presidents to literary icons to teen heartthrobs. To date, a number of Vanity Fair covers have featured Leibovitz’s stunning—and often controversial—portraits of celebrities. Demi Moore (very pregnant and very nude) and Whoopi Goldberg (half-submerged in a bathtub of milk) are among the most remembered actresses to grace the cover in recent years. Known for her ability to make her sitters become physically involved in her work, one of Leibovitz’s most famous portraits is of the late artist Keith Haring, who painted himself like one of his canvases for the photo.

During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. The most notable was the American Express “Membership” campaign, for which her portraits of celebrity cardholders, like Elmore Leonard, Tom Selleck, and Luciano Pavarotti, earned her a 1987 Clio Award.

In 1991, Leibovitz’s collection of over 200 color and black-and-white photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Later that year, a book was published to accompany the show titled Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990. In 1996, Leibovitz was chosen as the official photographer of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. A compilation of her black-and-white portraits of American athletes, including Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, were published in the book Olympic Portraits (1991).

Annie Leibovitz is one of my all time favorite photographers ever. I think she became so critically important after being the last person to take photos of the famous John Lennon just mere hours before his untimely death. She seems to be able to not only take photos of celebrity's but she is able to encapture their spirit as well. She also makes famous people look like regular people. I love the fact that she can get them to do whatever she has inspiration to do.

Ralph Eugene Metyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) attended Williams College as part of the Navy's V12 program in World War II. Following the war, he married, became a licensed optician, and moved to Lexington, Kentucky. When the first of his three children was born, Meatyard bought a camera to make pictures of the baby. Quickly, photography became a consuming interest. He joined the Lexington Camera Club, where he met Van Deren Coke, under whose encouragement he soon developed into a powerfully original photographer. Meatyard used still images to record things usually reserved for moving images, such as the motion on subjects in an otherwise solid setting, scenes part sharp and out-of-focus, children and others sometimes masked, in seemingly normal, yet oddly disquieting, situations. His photographs create a world of mystery and one concerned with the ineffability of reality. Meatyard's work is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Smithsonian Institution and many other important collections.

Ralph Metyard photography have a dark sense of humor. I feel like his work reminds me of scary movies like psycho and silent hill. A lot of his images appear ghostly or having some type of grim reaper effect. He seems to play with light and shadow and shutter speeds in order to obtain the ghostly effects in his photos. The humor in the photos can be obtained from really looking at the images and seeing a whimiscalness either from the people or the way things in the photos are positioned. His work keeps you wondering what exactly are you looking at.

Gary Winograd

Garry Winogrand photographed to see what things looked like photographed. He first picked up a camera in the 1950's and didn't put it down until his untimely death in 1984. During the 30 years he photographed, Winogrand created numerous images, produced five books, and exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad. He shot in the street, from the hip, up close with a wide-angle lens, often tilting the camera. He was a prolific shooter and his images capture what is known to photographers as the 'decisive moment.'

Winogrand's subject was America. He documented the city and the urban landscape, concentrating on its unusual people and capturing odd juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects. Winogrand began photographing in New York, doing commercial work. He was inspired by Walker Evans' 1938 book American Photographs and for the first time realized that photographs could communicate something special and unique. Impressed by not only Evans, but also by Robert Frank, whose book The Americans also came out in 1958, Winogrand emulated their intelligent use of the photographic medium. And immediately set out to carve his own niche as an imagemaker who participated in, as well as documented contemporary life. Winogrand made the city, the zoo, the airport, and the rodeo his home, and spent endless hours photographing there. A photographer of this sort is a wanderer, constantly roaming the globe, clicking the shutter wherever he went.

Winogrand's photographs catch that odd moment where unrelated activities coincided, and it is the nature of these juxtapositions that sets his work apart from other photographers. He photographed all subjects with the same detached but observant eye, making complex compositions through which the viewer weaves. In his first book The Animals (1969), photographs of people and animals at the zoo are both a humorous and sarcastic look at the human race. The animals exhibit human-like qualities and when photographed in relation to humans it is often hard to tell who is performing for whom. In one shot an elderly woman wearing diamond studded pointy sunglasses looks out from the lower right hand corner of the image. Behind her two rhinos butt heads, their bodies echoing the shape of her glasses. In another zoo photograph a couple rests against an animal cage, their backs turned to the animal who visually will cross their paths, breaking their interaction apart. Much of the action on Winogrand's photographs is implied. The pictures exist before, in anticipation of that which is about to occur.

Winogrand's other books include Women are Beautiful (1975), Public Relations (1977), and Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980). For Women are Beautiful Winogrand photographed women on the streets of New York. He pictured them going about their business, unaware that they were being photographed. The women pictured are determined and fierce, and not necessarily feminine or beautiful. The pictures seem to be less about a particular subject than where the subject lies in space and how the light falls to illuminate them and their surroundings.

Public Relations was a project to "photograph the effect of the media on events." The photographs in this series include pictures taken at sports arenas as well as at special parties and events. Shot with a flash, these images not only document a particular time and place in American history (like a Muhammad Ali press conference, or a dinner for the Apollo 11 astronauts), but they give us a glimpse of how these situations were created for the media.

This exhibition juxtaposes a selection of the photographs he made in New York City with those from Los Angeles. Those of New York are dark and dense. Shot from the hip, often at an angle, they are packed compositions that usually feature a central figure or couple juxtaposed with peripherals that echo the central image. In photographing Los Angeles, Winogrand opened up his compositions, allowing light the fill the frame. These images feature the lure of Los Angeles--snake charmers on Venice Beach, tourists in Hollywood, the Huntington Gardens and the Santa Monica pier. The characters who populate these places, celebrating the complexities of their interactions, is the subject of these images. Winogrand might document a single small gesture or look, but the photograph makes that moment significant. And it is this collection of significant moments that constitutes Winogrand's unique view of the world.
I appreciate that I got to find the photographer of the famous iconic Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate in the white dress. Did you know that Debbie Reynolds now owns that dress and is putting it up for auction at the end of this summer? In the Animal's cover I think it is reaaly interesting how the elephants trunk is curved up to the childs hand and if you look behind it you see the wall which is curved upwards like the elephants trunk pointing to the title.

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past thirty years. His career began at the early age of fourteen, when he made the precocious move of presenting his photographs to Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at MOMA. Recognizing Shore's talent, Steichen bought three of his works. At the age of 24 Shore became the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has also had one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the George Eastman House, Rochester, and the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970's sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

Most recently, Stephen Shore has photographed campaigns for Nike and Cadbury, fashion stories for Elle and Details, and a fashion story with world-renowned stylist Venetia Scott for Another Magazine. Other campaigns include Bottega Veneta S/S 06, Orange 2004/5 and Titleist 2004. A regular contributor to W Magazine, he's also picked up an SPD Gold Medal for a photo story in Details Magazine about a minor league baseball team.

Books of his photographs include Uncommon Places; The Gardens at Giverny; Stephen Shore: Luzzara; The Velvet Years, Andy Warhol’s Factory, 1965-1967; Stephen Shore: Photographs, 1973-1993; and American Surfaces, 1972. In 1998, Johns Hopkins University Press published The Nature of Photographs, a book he wrote about how photographs function visually. Since 1982 he has been the chairman of the photography program at Bard College where he is the Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts. He is represented by 303 Gallery in New York City.

Stephen Shore captures the most beautifiul lighting. The sky's in his portraits are breathtaking. I really enjoy his work because I feel like I can step into his work a be at that location visiting. I would be right there next that kid in the water taking a nice swim. Just like with his pictures of the pancakes I could sit down and just start eating. I find his work very enjoyable and fun!

William Eggleston

American photographer. Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, he studied photography at Vanderbilt University, Mississippi, but had worked self‐taught since getting his first camera at 18. From 1965 he experimented with colour, using it exclusively from 1967. Influenced by Cartier Bresson, whose book The Decisive Moment (1952) made an early and lasting impression on him, he belonged, like Winogrand and Arbus, to the generation that succeeded Walker Evans. Eggleston presents his work mostly in small format, using the vibrant dye transfer process.He achieved a breakthrough with his first one‐man show, William Eggleston's Guide, at MoMA, New York, in 1976. Since then, notwithstanding some early criticisms of his work as trivial or vulgar, he has been regarded as a pioneer of artistic colour photography.He worked initially on his home ground, the Deep South, photographing what appear to be typically American scenes: nondescript interior and exterior spaces, in which ceiling fans, an open refrigerator, garage entrances, or a street intersection acquire a kind of iconic resonance. From the 1980s he has documented his regular journeys through Europe, Africa, and Asia in lengthy photo series. He captures his subject matter as if by chance, in a snapshot‐like manner, adopting a ‘democratic’ approach that does not privilege particular types of scene or object.

William Eggleston's Style to me is Unique. It at time reminds me of when my kids get a hold of my camera and take pictures of things that I don't normally see because they have such a different sense of perspective than me. I also think that his use of line to draw your eye throughout the photo is interesting. I bet I can find some interesting stuff around my house