Hailey Porth Weekly Post

Over spring break I went to NYC with the Art Department and it changed my LIFE!!! Any who I saw this photographer at the MET and it was incredibly powerful

Jo Ratcliffe
http://www.stevenson.info/artists/ractliffe.html


  

  

 These are the ones I took but there grainy and gross so below are some better pictures. 

The Aftermath Of Conflict

Jo Ratcliff

Here's an article from the MET

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/jo-ractliffe

Jo is a South African photographer who documented the aftermath of the Angolan Civil War. She was able to capture landscapes and portraits of people and places that had been made desolated in the wake of the war. Ex soldiers would go back with her to these places and she was able to capture the emotion of emptiness and strife that categorized these regions. 

The exhibit was set up in a room with white walls, and every photograph had its own space it was cramped. Every photograph was able to breathe and tell its line in the story. The landscapes began to have just as much personality if not more as the portraits did. In each photograph there was the ability to make one feel the emptiness that the places and people have felt. 

Ratcliffe has provided a way to be able to capture emotion in lifeless objects. She has been able make a culture that has been destroyed and downtrodden come to life again. Her black and white photographs are not very contrasty making the subtleness of the photographs set the tone for the entire exhibit. 

I am going to dare to capture places like she does. The details and the broadness of places. Going the extra mile. The thing thats interesting that I read is she didn't just go there once but continued to go back making it an investment, a place where nobody wants to be found she found it necessary to go and document.