Sunday, 22 May 2011

Cindy Sherman

I have looked at Cindy Sherman’s work many times; intrigued by the way she has used herself as the subject for much of her work. She has taken on so many different appearances that you begin to consider what she looks like or what kind of person she really is. Most of the images she has used in her film stills series lead you to question where you have seen them before, maybe some old film from your childhood you caught glimpses of whilst flicking. She uses props to create her imagery such as wigs and various settings and then uses herself in various poses to portray women in film. She is able to show emotion and sometimes precarious situations in her images. Usually in black and white, her images look like old films and she uses costumes and make up which remind me of the beautiful women you used to see in old films.
In an interview with the Guardian, Sherman discussed her childhood, how she felt alone being the youngest and how her she didn’t really have a relationship with her father. She says how she loved to dress up and was obsessed with her appearance. The image I’ve chosen shows Sherman in a room, wearing a black dress standing with her back against a mirror. As with all the film still series, I try to imagine what kind of character she’s playing and why she has positioned herself as she has. The impression I get from this image is that she is meant to be in some kind of thriller film, her gaze wants to me to see what else out of shot and her expression and the arrangement of the furniture adds tension. I love how she is so versatile to change herself and mould into a new person in her photos, they are all individual and show female roles in film. Even though she has created many images in this collection, all are individual and take on many forms making them truly unique.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1997/sherman/index.html
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://ninjaradio.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/cindy-sherman-film-still.jpg

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin has a very sad background, her sister killed herself naturally provoking a lot of anger made worse by the predictions that Goldin would later do the same. She decided to go to ‘Free school’ at the age of 14 and then onto art college in Boston later. The eye catching thing about Goldins images is that they show everyday life, they are a part of herself and her new family around her and document trials she had been through. Her images are sometimes constructed showing links to films or the culture at the time they were taken. Some even look as though they reference paintings although she doesn’t link them directly. Her images show a time of exploring a sexuality which is fixed as a child, drugs culture, drag queens and relationships she had.
Within her work she created identity, wouldn’t sequence her work and include a lot of nude images sometimes using water which would symbolise cleansing. At the time it wasn’t normal for people to have a camera everyday so it was almost like she was creating celebrities of her friends. She would show her relationships especially one with a man named Brian which was very sexual and emotional and he often beat her, which is shown by some of her images. She was later rehabilitated and came off the drugs with which time her images took a complete turn, from being taken in the day they were then done in the light symbolising her new life and often water again to show cleansing.
I like the pictures of the drag queens. These were often taken at night because at this time they were scared to be out during the day. At this stage of her life, Nan Goldin was pretty much nocturnal. She shot images of them because of how different from straight men because of their flexibility. Her images are casual and appear to be snap shots at the time, almost like our snap shots in the family albums. The image I’ve chosen shows two men in a taxi in drag but their expression and pose is very natural leading me to conclude she has just got her camera out and snapped freezing them in time. She did lose a lot of her friends due to HIV and these images are obviously a way for her to remember them. I think her work documents her strange and interesting life letting us in to a completely different world and shows us how everyone’s family life is individual.

http://www.artnet.com/artists/nan-goldin/

Walker Evans

I first saw some of Walker Evans work a couple of years ago and went back and used it for the contemporary photography section as I wanted to use pictures of old cars much like he did. Looking at his work he uses a range of objects and people in his images, not really looking at nature for his work. I think the way he has taken a range of subjects and used composition makes his images so effective because he looks at what appears to be just a street or a person and shoots in a way that wasn’t conventional, almost exploring the mundane and every day. I think his best work is in black and white offering a clear cut clarity which is sometimes lost in colour.
Stephen Shore uses his work in his book ‘The Nature of Photographs’ to look at space and Evans documentary style. Shore discusses how Evans uses space in Gas Station and how the sky looks collaged and that Evans has focussed on one part of the image specifically. Looking at one of his other images, Mining Town, Shore talks about how the perspective of the houses in the background show “receeding space” (Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 38). Evans again uses composition in a way of making you want to explore this place and landscape, I love photos showing old things such as old cars and towns and his work does exactly that.
Joe’s Auto Graveyard denotes a rabble of broken, rotting cars against a vast background of ploughed fields. Here he has used space again as Stephen Shore talked about, seemingly endless and his focus on the cars make you look where it is important. I like how the cars are almost abandoned with bits missing to show disuse and how we have just used them to their purpose to throw them away. The use of black and white in this image to me makes me relate to sadness as well as the title of graveyard connoting death, the cars are the darkest part of the image which highlights damage and lack of care. The cars look out of place just by the side of the road but they add to the landscape, the convergence of man-made and nature.


Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, Phaidon Press Inc. 2010

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore has spent a lot of time with photography, whether it is taking the photos himself, exploring them or teaching about photography. In his book the Nature of Photography he has spent time looking at a variety of photographs from all different times and genres and tries to find out ‘how the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photograph.’ (Foreword, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 2)
 The Nature of Photographs, critically analyses all aspects of photography from various artists from Robert Adams, Ed Weston to Andre Kertesz. His writing makes you look deeper into the image, searching for the same meanings and ideas he uses. The chosen photos cover a range of subjects from pictures of beds, people to structures. He is so versatile in his writing, looking a range of aspects that I may not have looked at when I first saw the image. He has made me study images in a different way to how I originally did, studying all of the different parts that make the completed piece. He looks at the semiotics of the imagery, focusing on not just what it is but what it says to the viewer. He has split the book into sections the physical level, the depictive level, the mental level and mental modelling and has chosen images accordingly.
His image El Paso Street is from the Depictive Level discussing framing. The picture is of a junction of streets in El Paso, Texas and we can see a man waiting to cross, buildings, a tree and a blue sky. The image reminds me of one by Walker Evans called Gas Station who has also shot a road with buildings and a clear sky but that is only because of the composition. Initially you think well, it’s just a road why is this so important but Shore discusses how we know that this road continues and there’s more than what we can see but “the world of the photograph is captured within the frame”. (Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 62).  I think this shows how a photo captures a split second of time, the man may never be crossing this road again, the front of the cinema would show other films and the whole setting may now have changed but for this photo, it shows a whole section of a place that could never look this way again.



Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, Phaidon Press Inc. 2010

Annie Leibovitz

Being a huge Johnny Depp fan I was quite excited to see an image of him appear during Friday’s discourse lesson. The image was taken by Annie Leibovitz, a photographer renown for her beautiful images of the famous including The Rolling Stones, The Queen and a range of actors and actresses.
Leibovitz researches her work well and also uses a lot of equipment whilst taking her images on location. With the pictures of the Queen, she had many ideas some of which were not allowed because the Queen decided against them. The image of her outside is an example of this where Leibovitz had to create this post shooting. She regularly creates a relationship with her subjects and later goes back to shoot. I think this is shown in her images as the sitter seems so relaxed and it is almost natural for them to be doing what they are in the shot.
The image of Johnny Depp is him in a bed, half naked with a cigarette. For someone who is regularly photographed if at a film premiere or snapped by paparazzi, this is completely different type of image. As the viewer I almost feel I am pressing upon his privacy because he is lying in a bed without looking at the camera and is not fully clothed. I do think it is a striking image apart from him being a very attractive man but it is looking at the link between nudity and the celebrity. It makes me think that he is just a man who happens to do a job that makes him famous but until he donned the role of Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp was relatively unknown, where now he is one of the most famous actors in the world. Leibovitz states that this is what she see they are just people not thinking about how famous they are.
Annie Leibovitz has completed a couple of shoots with Johnny Depp and her images all have the same quality. She has created portraits for the new Pirates of the Caribbean film and all of her images host a kind of mystical feel to them. The image of Depp on the bed works well in black and white, almost classically and as there isn’t any strong light sources the image is quite soft, he truely epitomises the sense of calm and being relaxed from his body positioning and facial expression. Ive researched into some of her other works and it shows how she has created a relationship with them, she is definitely one of my favourite photographers.

Annie Leibovitz at Work, 2008

Real Men Do Cry

As a child I grew up in a family where my father was a strong role model. He was a proud and confident man who has influenced my now adult part of my life. He was the bread winner of the family whilst my mother looked stayed at home and looked after my brother and I and still corrects me to this day when I don’t pronounce my t’s and glares at me for swearing. I remember at one point when I was younger thinking why is it so uncomfortable when I saw him crying after initially fearing that something had gone horribly wrong which is why he was weeping. I’m not sure why my brain jumped to this conclusion because he is only human and he does have feelings, stress and problems so why can’t he cry. Is it really just a woman thing or does it show loss of control for a man and vulnerability?
 It’s a shame we stereotype that real men don’t cry as it means they’re weak but sometimes I think crying does make you feel better at times. I asked a group of the people I work with when they last cried. Some of the women said from a day to two weeks ago whereas the men hadn’t cried for some time, up to two years ago. The time difference correlated with the gender as we would expect, that the men hadn’t cried for a longer time than the women. When I am watching a film or TV program when a man cries I always think oh dear this is bad for this guy to be crying and if you think about it, it’s strange to do so.
Sam Taylor Wood has taken this idea and turned it into a photograph collection. She has taken photos of well known men whilst they are crying. These include Dustin Hoffman, Woody Harrelson, Laurence Fishburne and more. Some of the images were staged making themselves cry whereas others were caught in the moment. When I initially looked at the images, I empathised with the subject and tried to work out why they may be crying which links back to when I was younger with my dad but then I realised I didn’t have to do this, I could just look at the pictures for what they were of a man and crying and they are beautiful. I was watching a film with Woody Harrelson in it recently called Zombieland, it is an amusing take on what would happen if the world had been overtaken by zombies but Harrelson’s character is far from one that would cry. He plays the typical macho protagonist of the film, quite happy to kill the diseased inhabitants but this image contradicts that.  
Taylor Wood uses such soft lighting which halos the men in some of the pictures and I do personally think they look vulnerable because it’s not something the viewer is used to. Saying this, there is a quality about these images which draws you in makes you want to investigate, to find out what has occurred and console them to make them smile again. It shows you that these men, famous as they are, are in fact just men and have emotions and struggles to deal with in their own lives and these images make them look a little more human.


Friday, 20 May 2011

Robert Frank

Frank spent time travelling across 48 states in the USA taking photos to understand why it was promoted as the land of the free. Jack Kerouac stated the photographs that followed had never been seen before and so ‘for this he would definitely be hailed as a great artist in his field’. (Jack Kerouac, The Americans, 1958, page 7)
Frank has been born to wealthy parents in 1924 and lived under threat during World War Two because of his Jewish heritage. He was very rebellious as a child and later travelled Europe and then onto America. He wanted to see what was happening in the US because the media had always promoted it as the land of the free.
The images in Frank’s book The Americans were taken between 1955 and 1956 when the world was trying to change after the Second World War. Frank was greatly influenced by people around him and his images from this period focus on patriotism, racism, dividing of the classes and everyday culture. His images also show how technology was changing and a lot of them feature jukeboxes. I think all of his images are extremely powerful and I like the way he doesn’t always focus on the obvious. In one of his images at Hollywood film premiere, the star is blurred and he captures the people’s faces and expressions from behind her. It shows how we, as consumers look at celebrity and follow them when it doesn’t really affect our own life and this image shows this. I also like how he looked at how people were deliberately separated such as the image of people on the bus where the blacks and whites are separate and the woman in the front almost looks indignant that she has to share the bus at all.
I also like the image of the black woman holding the white baby. Instantly it makes us think of that she is the child’s nanny and that is fifty years after Franks images were taken. Frank was disappointed at the lack of spirituality in America and how religion wasn’t really seen. He was however impressed at the number of people in the cities, compare his Paris photo of the Arc Du Triomphe to any image now of any major city to see a change. Some of his photos show the super highways, empty of cars but these new roads linking the people all together over this vast expanse of land.
Frank looked at a range of things in the country, he photographed the American flag to symbolise their patriotism. I was shocked when working in America a couple of years ago when I dropped the American flag and they made me burn it because it was disrespectful. At the time I thought they were insane but it shows how they feel about their country. Many people have the misconception and stereotypes about the Americans but I do think, looking back that it is uplifting that they are proud to be an American and of living in this country. I was shocked to find that hardly any of the children I worked with had a passport. They said they do not need to leave their state or country as it has everything they needed and they didn’t desire to go anywhere else. This was extremely strange to me as I was abroad for four months at the time and enjoying every minute of it.








The Americas, Robert Frank, 1958

Feminism

It is said that in reference to semiotics, everything about us represents something. Throughout history the photograph has influenced how women are portrayed, it can show us how gender is represented. An example of this is Annie Sprinkle, an American performance artist and a post porn modernist who is confident in herself who quite freely shows off her body. The images of her may not be what we today see as the womanly form because of the stick thin women surrounding the media but once the curvy figure was how women used to look and it shows to just look at any paintings from the past. Sprinkle states that glamour shoots are extremely hard work, standing in ridiculous heels, being strapped in or laced up in your outfit which pinches or sucks everything in so you look ‘beautiful’ for the camera.
The female form has been used in advertising for years, the media consistently saying to us as consumers this is sexy, this is how you should look. I saw a Coke can with a woman from the 50’s on the side of it enjoying Coke possibly for its ‘classic taste’. Men and women have been constantly divided throughout history because of stereotyping like not being able to vote or apply for certain jobs but then the Suffragettes stood up for women’s rights to make it equal. This does not just apply to reality but in film, women’s roles have changed so much from the typical damsel in distress to the femme fatale and women in many modern films taking charge. Actresses such as Marilyn Munroe and Laura Mulvey show that behind the perfectly coiffed hair, the dazzling smile and beautiful appearance that not everything is as it seems.
The Guerrilla Girls do exactly what Hollywood doesn’t. They create art to educate on the way women’s bodies are portrayed. On their website it states, ‘The Guerrilla Girls, reinventing the F word – feminism’. They began campaigning because they went to an art gallery and realised that hardly any of the exhibitors were women and then later did some more research and found that most of the influential art galleries hardly had work from any female artists. They decided to put a stop to this and campaigned creating imagery keeping anonymous but just using masks to hide their identities. Their work is done with humour and tries to provoke a response by showing discrimination. On their website they state that they are feminist masked avengers and expose sexism, racism, corruption in politics, art, film and pop culture. I think the work they are doing is good and is obviously successful as they go all over the world campaigning for women’s rights. I love the loud colours they use and the sarcastic language to really draw attention. I think it is also interesting how they use names of old female artists instead of their own to keep their anonymity. Hopefully their continuous hard work will make a difference in the future.



Modernism/Post Modernism

It is expected for things to upgrade, develop and change through time, it is the way of moving forward. People argue that this is for better or worse, for example transport evolving has made it so we are better connected, we can go to new places and experience different cultures.  Technology updating has meant that daily tasks are easier and quicker but some may argue that all types of modernisation causes struggle.
Initially the world began to change in the 16th to 18th centuries with steam engines, factories, industrialisation, mass communication and more which over the years that has caused wars continuing today as the people revolt against these changes. Marx recognised that there were many bad points about modernisation such as the increasing sense of want and have,’ I must have the newest phones, I want this summer trends’ and machinery replacing human labour means people are starving and in poverty. Nietzsche believed that Christian ideals are being destroyed as we develop, that God is dead. Futurists on the other hand argue that we should dismiss the past and embrace today and tomorrow. So what is the solution and what has this done to the art world?
Much like these views, art has separated itself out. The post modernists mix everything together using past and present for inspiration. They integrate everything together to create something new whereas the modernist photographer would work almost rigidly looking at form, angles and technology. This has happened with music; Jimi Hendrix was ahead of his time and created music using feedback and wah-wah pedals which hadn’t been done before. Rock music also developed from the blues so taking something from the past and creating something new. Architecture has also undergone radical transformations where buildings now look less at function but more at colour and design.
Post modernism is more playful, light hearted and follows popular culture. Compare Ed Westons work with William Eggleston, both of their works can be perceived to beautiful but are completely different. Weston looks at form and composition whereas Eggleston uses colour and strange objects and ideas to create his work. The work of Ed Ruscha in his collection 34 parking lots looks at society and how cars change our landscapes for better or worse. Ruscha looks at how the oil leaks are like traces of us, ghostly memories left to show where we once parked our cars. I think there are many problems with moving forward so quickly but things can work together I write as I listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan on my iPod, contradictory to the futurists I think the past does influence us every day, we just need to ensure we use it positively and learn from it.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche