Thursday 3 March 2011

The best of the past with the inventiveness of the present in Photography

Ever thought of mixing realism with Zen spiritualism in your photography? Ever heard of Minor White?

How exciting was it, I wonder, to shoot the world of jazz and the American civil rights movement like Roy DeCarava? His portrait of John Coltrane, 1963:


Jerry Uelsmann's shots enter the surreal world, using multi-negatives and many enlargers to make an image in the darkroom. It is post-visualisation. Untitled 1969:


Olivia Parker's still life shots using various cameras :


Annie Leibovitz: documenting  and era's culture:




David Hockney: a painter using photography to explore perspective and how we see and look:


Cindy Sherman: self portraits, many like paintings or movie stills or magazine adverts:




Robert Mapplethorpe: documenting the gay community and producing exquisite still life shots.




Sally Mann's old processes and equipment and family portraits:




Martina Lopez's stunning images of the past and the new by assembling old images with new processing:




Gregory Crewdson: staged and elaborate shots, visualised by him but executed by his assistants:




There it is. A quick visual run through of the last part of Jeff Curto's excellent History of Photography, Spring 11 Class 3 and the final part of my 'lecture notes'


Photography has come out of the centre of Daguerre and Talbot and spread out in all directions but mixed with each other on the way. 


Hope you enjoyed just looking at the pictures if nothing else! Some great artists here to explore in detail.







2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you may want to add a facebook button to your website. Just bookmarked this article, however I must do this manually. Just my $.02 :)

James Dyas Davidson said...

Do you mean this blog? If so, there is a 'Share' button. But if you're talking about my web site, then I'm at the mercy of Photium.
Cheers.