Brandon Mabrouk- Weekly Post 3/14/2016

Scott Kelby

Steve McCurry

Serge Najjar

I don't necessarily compare my work to these artists but I am influenced by their style and how they are able to capture such great content. Scott Kelby's travel photography makes you want to explore areas of the world that have unique structures. It looks as if he has an extensive editing process but makes the photo look astonishing. Steve McCurry's defiant color and soft lighting has influenced me to go out and make pictures and actually care about the content that is in the viewfinder, that is what separates the good from the great photos. I believe that if you care you will make photos that have meaning and could possibly influence others. I can only stick to a theme if I am inspired by it. Serge Najjar is an artist that I began to study this year, his work is minimal but every element works very well. Using geometric shapes and colors to identify lines that separate each other. 

The critique inspired me to continue making pictures of what I feel, the pictures that I made inspired me. It was definitely a learning experience for me, I believe that if I care for every photo that I capture and the subject that is in it instead of just what is in the moment than I can improve my style and be confident about what I am making. If I can make a photo of someone doing something that inspires them, than it will inspire me even more.

Hailey Porth Blog Post

Brenda Ann Kenneally

Mae Ryan

Marc Riboud

Nicholas Nixon

Robin Hammond

Tomer Ifrah

in the project I really grasped more of the position of the artist and the relationship behind the photographs. I wanted to be able to catch the stories of people instead of just snapshots of the faces. I wanted people to look at the portraits and wonder more of whats going on in their lives. In all of these photographs the photographer is able to do that for me. I constantly was reading up on what was happening in these peoples lives after and or before this photograph was taken.

From the critique I want to be able to push myself further and capture more than just people but the personality of the places where the people were found. What is the environment around them saying about them? I want to be able to capture light and color the same way photographers are able to capture it in portraits but apply it to landscapes. I want to be able to create a place where people can put a story to the landscape that they see because of the nostalgia it brings them or hope and dreams of the future. 

Who I am looking at now 

Jonas Feige

David Mclain

Anna Luker Blog Post

Lilia Li-Mi-Yan

Following up with the reactions received from the last critique I found myself feeling lost. Spent a lot of time just trying to dig deeper into maybe what I should be trying to express in my photos and what is maybe unintentionally portrayed. So I took so time to look up various photos that just made me feel different types of emotions or made me react a certain way. Then I came across this series of work. Ive spared you the audience from the other photos but feel free to check them out yourself! 

~ You've been warned ~

Click  here to continue

" “Nausea” by Russian photographer Lilia Li-Mi-Yan from Calin Kruse’s excellent Dienacht Publishing venture reminds me of what would happen if Robert Gober’s sculptures and Francis Bacon’s paintings would conceive of if they accidentally had sex, miscarried, and found a way to resuscitate the gentle corpse back to life." Since 1991 she has been living and working in Moscow.

I found myself totally creeped out, anxious, and almost repulsed at these photographs. Then I sat and actually looked at the elements that made me feel a certain way and I came to the idea that simplicity is really important. Most of the series of work are not these extreme situations or un-ordinary circumstances. Yet I felt so uncomfortable looking at them. Perspective has a lot to do with them. The lighting and simple but perfect composition as well I believe contributes to the emotions received. They are so 'off ' and have said to be shocking, grotesque, and challenging. Which I feel all these adjectives fill the description very well. But her use of different angles is what I feel contributes most of the success to this body of work. 

"Corporeity is in the center of the author’s creative process."

Victoria Garnett, Weekly Post 3/14/2016

Photographer  References:


Allen Russell
                                                    

Shikhei Goh

Stephen Shore

What inspired me from my own photos is that I feel like I developed a little style or maybe a habit when I make photographs of objects and sometimes people. This little style or habit that I do when it comes to positioning myself to where I am looking up at my subjects and they appear as though they larger than what they really are. This inspired me to continue to think of different ways to position my subjects in my next photographs. Also in my photography I noticed that I make photos in a lot of different things that can be in a documentary and artistic style.  I want to be able to learn how to do it all.

 As I was being critiqued I started to realize things that I wasn’t even aware of about myself and as an artist. The critique made me think of what I could possibly be feeling or thinking as I make. So for the next time I go on a shoot, I will pay more attention to what I’m feeling when I am seeing things.

 I noticed from the feedback that I have a poetic style to my photographs and in the relationships that the photos that I chose to show. From the critique of others I remember an individual saying how they noticed the connection of older and younger generations in my documentary like photo. I also noticed by placing photographs beside other images with similar color schemes can make the presentation more interesting to look at. 

Since critique I have been doing exactly what I mentioned in the second paragraph. I've been thinking about what is that I am feeling in the moment of making my photos. This could be something that individuals will feel the same about or not but I hope to think that my photos will give off some sort of feeling or emotion. 

Rachel Trautmann's Weekly Blog Post - 3/14/16

References:

Salvador Dali - Photography Work

 

David LaChapelle

 

Annika von Housswolff (Earlier Blog Posted)

I was inspired by the photos in my last project because they were all images I wouldn’t have captured otherwise. They helped open up my overall idea of what I should photograph, which is everything. The use of direct lighting in many of the images from critique intrigued me. I was also taken back by the simplicity of a lot of the images. A simplicity that didn't make the images feel like they were lacking something. Both the direct lighting and simplicity are things I would like to use moving forward. Some of the things I enjoy most about my photography, subject matter not included, is the crispness and sharpness of my images. I also like to create images that a person wouldn't necessarily be able to see without the use of a camera. 

Kerry Kilburn Blog Post 3/14/2016

Three photographers I will use as references are:
Takashi Homma (Mushrooms of the Forest - photobook): for the elegant simplicity of his mushroom shots and his ability to get great shots against white backgrounds;

Agnes Thor for her "found" still lifes - which are fantastically composed and lit;

Autum Sasala for the color and lighting she manages to achieve in the macrophotography she makes using her iphone.

The most important idea I culled from both my own work and the critiques was that appropriation - even when it's appropriation from multiple artists - can result in a body of work that has its own voice and that includes pieces that share ideas, themes, and/or formal qualities. We saw this in every critique - and I can't speak for anyone else, but I was honestly surprised to see this in my own work. I also learned how important the editing process is - the process of placing individual images next to one another to see what kind of meaning can emerge synergistically. Again, we saw how powerful a technique this is in every critique, and, even though I've created series of photographs in other classes, I was amazed at what emerged when photos I thought were independent of one another were put together.

I was interested to see that the theme of aloneness/loneliness arose for more than one of us - it was certainly a part of my own work and tends to run through a lot of my images and series of images. Another important theme that ran through the critiques themselves was that the viewer of an image creates his/her own meaning about that image, regardless of what the photographer thought he/she was trying to express. This is something I especially need to remember, both as a photographer and as a viewer of images. I was actually proud of the readings I heard of my own work - they were much richer than what I tend to see in it myself, and that is the kind of validation that helps me value my own work.

So much of the content I saw was inspirational that I hardly know where to begin. First, a few students are clearly gifted at creating powerful, unsettling tableaus. This is not something I aspire to, but something I admire tremendously. I saw some fantastic portraits, and was inspired to work on my own portraiture, both in general and as part of this project. Finally, many of my classmates have wonderful ways of working with light; I'd like to explore some of their lighting concepts and incorporate them into this project.

Katelyn Curtis Blog Post

                                       

                                     Before Tomorrow: Yanik Willing

                                                            By:Katelyn Curtis




                           



                                   



                                   



        Yankee Willing chose a place that had just come out of a 30 year civil war and seeked to capture the people and lands that followed the post war. He singled out people that showed their current life situations or military personal surrounding the locations he visited. Also, he kept taking pictures of the future locations where companies wanted to build hotels and shops where mines once littered that area. Most of the photos ar singular with subject but feed the viewer with info with how they dress or what they carry. Even the backgrounds behind the subjects hold a lot of meaning as we see some some of the aftermath since the war ended. 


        The artist is choosing to show what once was left destroyed or effected from the civil war, but yet, the people are still forced to keep moving ahead and businesses planning on revamping the land to bring in tourist. Willing mentioned he realized how different the country was going to be economically, politically, and culturally after the end of the war. Sure enough, the reports had huge boom of tourist compared to the previous years and off Willing went for another two times, 8 weeks each, to recapture the after effect of him visiting the first time. After he had gotten all his photos he teamed up with a graphic designer to create a high quality newspaper to sell to people, symbolizing the contents on the inside are going to be apart of history. By getting 60 people to pay in advance he was able to self publish his own series that caught a lot of people attention.



         I think it was pretty a daring project that he took on and even went a further step to self publish the prints himself. The subject matter is compelling in the sense that I have never had to go through a point in my life were I have witnessed an civil war, or the aftermath, so to see these photos and how the people re doing after is very intense. These photos are probably scratching the surface and how the people are overcoming obstacles of the post war is still occurring and the country as a whole are going to have to come together to be one again. Willing mentioned that he will be returning.  Im very curious to see were his next adventure leads him.