Jessica Lange

Jessica Lange is a well known actress in the U.S., but as little people know, she is also a photographer. I absolutely love Jessica Lange's photographs because they are so beautifully romantic. They have such a sense of atmosphere as well as emotion. These images are delicate while being powerful at the same time. The photograph above stirs up feelings of loving, warmth, and poetry. This image is captured at exactly the perfect moment. This is how the rest of her photographs are, which really helps the viewer to engage in the scene.

This engagement is also what makes these photographs so strong. She takes these pictures as though she is a fly on the wall, but you still feel engaged because there is an exchange between the photographer and the subject. She is simply an anonymous observer, but the pictures still seem personal.

Her acting background also lends a very cinematic quality to her work. This is the atmosphere, dramatic lighting, and specific moments in time that look like they could be from a film still. I love these images because they look like stills from an old romantic movie that I would really like to see.

Evelyn Hofer

Evelyn Hofer is a black and white photographer (she worked with color some) whose work spanned from 1946 to 1998.

One word I thought of when I first viewed her photography was "quiet". As you can see from the photographs above, all of her subjects seem so still. Her images are classical, cool, and calm. They seem to be completely immobile, but also very permanent. She monumentalizes the subjects in her photographs. She uses light and balance in her composition. They are serious and direct, but they also have a sly quality. Its almost as though the two housekeepers in the image above have a secret. They are also standing so statuesque, something that you would see in a portrait of someone in an upper class.

What is interesting to me about her work is that she chose to photograph people of the working class. By photographing them and monumentalizing them, she gave them importance and regard.

Blog 6

"Will I Ever Know What It Means to Be Chinese"

Thomas Holton is an American born photographer from Manhattan, New York. His heritage is that he is half-Chinese, his American, New-York based photographer father married his mother after he met her in Taiwan, and then he moved his family back to New York. Although Holton grew up in Manhattan, his grandparents lived in Chinatown. He was half-Chinese, but he still felt like a visitor in Chinatown. This is what motivated his series "The Lams of Ludlow Street".

Holton moved in with a Chinese family that lived in Chinatown called the Lams. He soon became a part of the household as he photographed the family going ahead with their daily lives. He would even accompany the family on trips. With these photographs, he was documenting their lives. All of the pictures are candid, and this gives them a reality that wouldn't exist if they would've been posed. These photographs perfectly capture the essense of the subkects as well as their relationship to each other and their surroundings.

What really drew me to these photographs is how intimate they are. This is what really gives them meaning. Its like I'm getting a secret look into this family's lives behind closed doors.

Blog Entry 3

IMPLEMENTING AN IMAGE

Photography by Jay Defeo

Jay Defeo worked with black and white photography as well as with painting and drawing. What really drew me to her work was that I could really see the connection between drawing and painting in her photographs. She often photographed what she had drawn and then used these photographs as a basis for other drawings. She referred to this as "transplanting an image".

She worked on her black and white photographs from 1969 to 1976. All of her images were very intimate in size. Most were smaller than eight by ten and some were even as small as 3 by four inches. Her images have familiar shapes and the same smooth quality. The lines and undulating forms seem to radiate from a center.

She loved to experiment. None of her subjects fit into a traditional genre. They could be considered "still lifes", but they are a whole lot more than that. To me, these objects are more about form and tone. Defeo used her camera as a visual journal. She didn't document her subject in traditional ways, but more as abstractions of different shapes and tones. Images of plants make up about a quarter of her work. She worked with simple objects, and very often natural, mostly plants. She often photographed roses, like in the photograph above called "The Rose".

In the darkroom, she had a lot of technical talent. She often made multiple prints from a negative. Each different print she would differentiate the tonalities, contrast, and cropping. When photographing, Defeo would create variations by walking around a subject to get different perspectives at different times of the day and even on different days. She was very interested in the visual idea and the classical form. This is why I love her photographs so much. I love the idea of taking something so simple as a leaf on a plant and manipulating it to become something so beautiful.

I have been interested in Andy Goldsworthy, a British sculptor and photographer, since highschool. I was given a book of his photographs, which are images of natural sculptures. The thing that really interests me about this artist is that all of his works look impossible. They are one hundred percent natural, but they all seem as though they defy nature. Everything he uses in his sculptures are found objects. They way he manipulates these objects look almost unnatural. The way he uses color and shape to make sharp, unnatural edges is beautiful and breathtaking. His precision attributes to his patience and crafstmanship. Andy Goldsworthy's artistic process is to immerse himself in nature while he is making his sculptures. He will often live out in a forest for a few days while he works. A lot of the time his sculptures take many days and require a lot of manual labor which includes melting icicles together to make intricate webs and rolling boulders to stack together like a stone monument. He has also gone out into fields before its going to snow or rain to lay on the ground while the percipitation falls all around him. Once it is over, nothing but a silhouette is left. I love the simplicity of this idea.

I also love how like nature, none of his sculptures are permanent. I've read how sometimes he will spend days working on a pieces that fall a part as soon as he is done, but he is okay with this and he moves on to his next piece. He uses no type of glue or anything man-made. He uses no tools other than his hands.

These photographs make me stop every time and think,

How did he do that?

I chose to blog about Ute Behrend because her diptychs are my favorite from what I've seen. I would like to be able to use some of the same ideas for my own project 2.

She writes:
‘Fairy tales are more than children’s stories… they reveal fundamental truths and wisdom. If there is a collective unconscious, then fairy tales are surely firmly grounded in it and whoever is prepared to get involved with them can find them everywhere, knowing full well that everything will always end well.’

Ute Behrend's diptychs have a very beautiful and surreal quality. They remind me of a dream because they seem to be a hazy or incomplete memory. A lot of her photographs evoke a fantasy world, like a fairy tale. I personally would relate these photographs more to a dream than a fairy tale. The diptychs are so strong because they reference each other. While they are still pretty vague, they complete each other to make one strong visual image. I absolutely love the softness that she achieves in these photographs. There is also an old-timey quality that I love.

http://www.utebehrend.de/small_silent_city.html?page=4

I love the images in her series, "Small Silent City". I especially love the ones that have children in them. To me, these are the ones that are strongest because I love the idea of these diptychs being representations of childhood dreams. Thats what I see when I look at these images. It almost makes me remember those faint memories of how I saw things when I was a child and how I dreamed about them. The children almost give these photographs an innocence that translates to the other pannel. Its like you're seeing it through the eyes of a child. I love how the color ranges relate as well.

I think these diptychs are extremely successful. I would hang them all over my house if I could afford to buy them all. They are so beautiful not just because of their content, but they are visually stunning as well.

An artists whose work I really enjoy is Lucia Ganieva. She is a Russian photographer that lives and works in the Netherlands. Most of her photographs are portraits. Most of these portraits are people in their natural habitat. These photographs really grabbed my attention because I love to take these kind of photographs.

I've always been very curious about people, and what it is that makes us all different. I've always been intrigued by these differences and by how different other people's lives look from an outsider's perspective. For me, portraits are a great way of exploring these differences. I've always had a habit of staring. I stare at people and I ask questions,

Where do they come from?

Why do they look the way they do?

Where are they going from here?

Where do they live?

What do they do there?

I've always wished I could be a fly on the wall, to follow different people around and see what they're all about. Especially people from completely different backgrounds than myself. This is what Lucia Ganieva's portraits do for me, provide a window into her subject's lives. She has an amazing way of representing the character and the situation of the people that she's photographing.

http://www.luciaganieva.com/frame.php?catId=17362

Her photographs called "Abi" are all of women standing in similar backgrounds with similar clothing. Although these scenes look very similar, but upon further investigation, they all began to differentiate. All of these women have different facial expressions and posture. Lucia Ganieva really captured their character in these photographs. Putting them in similar backgrounds with similar clothes helped me to see the dissimilarities which attested to their individuality.