Anderson Gallery Post- Amber-Lynn Taber

I personally enjoyed Eve Sonneman's work. I feel like we were on the brink of discussing what's socially normal to represent in a gallery and as a curator and I appreciate that the was photography from women. I enjoy her abnormally frequent uses of diptychs and the vividness of her color photography. I would like to push the presentation of my works a bit more and not necessarily in an extreme manner just somethings as simple as continual use of diptychs which make you question the images side by side of each other.

Nikki- Anderson Gallery Post

The issue that I chose that was discussed at the Anderson Gallery is the topic of Exploitation. Exploitation, to me, is the idea that you are benefitting from exposing someone. Exposing, in the way that the person might not be shown in the best way. The artist that I chose was Elliott Erwitt, it is not the worst case of Exploitation, but I do think there is a question when it comes to shooting portraits, especially strangers and even children. As far as my own personal work, most of my subjects are people I know and who are ok with being photographed. So i don't think i have run into the issue of exploitation just yet.

Nikki's Artist Post- Dawoud Bay

Daeoud Bey

(Strangers/Community)

(Character Project)

Bay's use of hands in his portraiture is what immediately caught my attention to his work. In almost all of his portraits, the subjects hands are visible. This details gives us so much information about the subject and gives us an insight to the character.

Artist- Amber-Lynn Taber

Adam Jeppesen
Wake

I enjoy Jeppesen's use of isolation and lighting in his series Wake. The lighting works to hyper isolate the subject and dramatizes this lonliness. This hazy lighting also attributes some eerie and uncanny characteristic to the work, as if the photos were made in some sort of dream-like state.

Anderson Gallery Post - Andie Younkin

Danny Lyon speaks on the issue of confinement by the government in his work about the prisoner's on death row in the prison in Texas. These men live and die at the hand's of the law for decisions that made to commit a crime worth dying for in the judge's eyes. My work about the navy is also about confinement by the government but not so heavy handed. Military personnel are made into slaves by the government, working 60-80 hours a week, and are locked into a contract to do so. 

Artist Post - Andie Younkin

Roe Ethridge

Roe Ethridge uses studio lighting in his personal and commissioned works. This photograph struck me the most because of its painterly qualities in the subject's hair, face, and clothing. The only thing that grounds it to the current time period it the camera stand equipment that he chose to keep in the frame.

Photo Im scared to make... Nikki

Photographs in Public Places.

Image I was Scared to Make

Photograph I was afraid to make...

This image is less of a photo I was afraid to make but more of an image I was afraid to show.

Whitney-Scared Photo

I spent days worrying about what I was going to photograph, because I couldn’t for the life of me recall something I’d really wanted to photograph that I was afraid of. True to my personality, I had myself worked up over vague concepts that I had overlooked a literal instance in which I was too afraid to photograph something. A week or so ago, I was sitting in the car at the bp on Cary and Meadow waiting for my boyfriend to get gas. I was admiring the shapes and lighting that came from the window of the convenience store, the laundromat next door, the stacks of cigarette boxes and the round windows of the washing machines. I had my camera with me and everything, but I just could not will myself to take the picture. This is why I’ve found myself in a parking lot at the ass crack of dawn photographing this gas station. I think I want to do it again though, because I’m still unhappy with it. I will have to keep going back at different times/under different circumstances. I almost like the one I took right before I got back into the car. The colors, clouds and lights competing with the moon were just a different image completely. If I've learned anything from this it's that I can't let my thoughts keep me from just doing something.

A Photo I Was Afraid To Take

myself

Im scared to make

Kathryn Mayes - I'm scared to make images simply because of the light they contain, I move away from it if I don't find a deeper meaning or take the picture and just have it in a file folder.

Nikki Samson- Artist (David Eustace)

David Eustace

Davie Eustace has a wonderful way of capturing the character of a person with his photographs. He also has a great use of lighting that adds more character to the already great portraits. The last image is of a series that he did of/with his daughter when they completed a road trip, In Search of Eustace. In the opening he says, "I dont know if it is the most powerful portfolio to date? Thats for others to decide. I do know that it is my most meaningful..."

Whitney Cole- Artist (Berlinde De Bruyckere)

My artist this go-round is not a photographer, but a sculptor. Berlinde de Bruyckere creates these amazing, beautiful, but also a bit grotesque, sculptures of human-like forms. It is something in the shapes and the way they interact with their space and become new forms that really inspires me. I really would like to accomplish something like this in a photographic format. Or at least somehow blend my human forms with their environment in a non-forceful way. Maybe that sounds silly. What is silly is that de Bruyckere has no personal website. You can find her work here though.

Artist- Cait Oppermann

http://caitoppermann.com/

I really enjoy her use of lighting, and how she uses it to give the image certain tones. As well her use of intense lighting whether it be neon lights seen in the image or the use of flash and the way she uses them without it looking too obvious or overused.

Kathryn Mayes - Artist

John Divola 

I enjoy his use of light and the setting that he chooses to photograph, I mainly chose this artist to post as my own sort of inspiration for the appropriated photograph assignment. 

Picture I'm Afraid of Taking

Myself - Nude

I'm actually not that unfamiliar with self-portraits. I did a series of them for a project last semester for the first time since I wasn't too keen on photographing other subjects (and also because I didn't have subjects to photograph). However, they were only head shots. I'm very self-conscious, so self-portraits are pretty nerve-wracking to shoot, let alone nude self-portraits. I couldn't even bring myself to post the images of myself with only one breast showing, despite knowing that it is just art and bodies are bodies, and everyone generally has the same anatomy. I have no qualms about other people photographing themselves nude, and find something beautifully revealing and wonderfully vulnerable about nude portraits, but when it's myself—just no. It's almost as if I'm not only guarded about my body, but also my emotions, thoughts and ideas. I hope I can break from this shell and maybe one day do something really cool with nude self-portraits.

Artist - Berndnaut Smilde

Berndnaut Smilde
This might not be as deep and conceptual as other artists, but Berndnaut Smilde's ephemeral pictures of indoor clouds simply amaze me. Smilde's process of making these indoor clouds involves using a smoke machine, and then reducing the humidity in the room where the mist is released so that the cloud makes enough of a shape to photograph, a very time consuming and tedious process. This cloud formation is fleeting, and dissipates in seconds. These clouds are photographed in unconventional areas such as elevators or abandoned structures and deal with the concept of time, permanence and temporality.

what im afraid to photograph

As I get further into my artistic practice, I find more and more that I'm hesitant to take photographs simply for the sake of beauty. I think that if my photographs don't have a deep conceptual meaning behind them that they'll fall short and they wont be good enough to stand alone, to be admired simply for how they look. That might just be me being overly critical of my work but its a fear none-the-less.

artist - mike brodie (emily volles)

mike brodie is a young photographer who spent several months traveling via train hopping with friends. His photographic documentation of his travels are striking and very interesting to me, as I find a special interest in photographing my friends and their 'adventures'. It's interesting to note that Brodie made only this one body of work, and now considers himself retired and works as a mechanic.

artist- gregory halpern (emily volles)

I find his work to be beautiful as well as expressive. He seems to have a good mixture of documentary and 'fine art' work ( i put fine art in quotes because that's a very open ended term from a photographic stand point, but that's the best way I can put it with my so called artistic vocabulary).

Artist - Jessica Berry

Louise Lawler

"Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. All the while, she’s revealed how the installation of artworks is never neutral. Lawler photographed Jasper Johns’s White Flag hanging over a collector’s bed, Jeff Koons’s $80 million Rabbit near someone’s refrigerator, a woman casually gesturing with a Picasso sculpture in hand, a Gerhard Richter nude resting on its side on a museum floor, and Warhols galore in auction houses, art fairs, apartments, and galleries." (nymag)

I really love this series, I have been focusing and reading a lot about the objects that we hold dear to us, how we treat them, and what they mean. I feel like this series speaks a lot about that with these precious pieces of artwork and the places they inhabit. Do they take on a new form or can you view art anywhere?

afraid to photograph - Jessica Berry

i'm afraid to focus on my body (nude)

1. personal insecurities: such as weight, scars, "beauty"

2. forces me to be completely vulnerable to the viewers of the image and I feel out of control about it

3. my extremely religious background and telling my mother what I was photographing and posting because I would rather tell her than have someone else show her. 

Afraid

Patriotic Religion

Luigi Ghirri

Luigi Ghirri's work sis most striking to me because of the color. Obviously, the nature of his kodachrome project, from which these images come, is very much based on color as an overreaching theme. The idea of color being the unify element of a body of work is something that has interested me for quite some time. It's so simple that sometimes I convince myself that it is not complicated or deep enough to have art school or art community merit but that has been severely disproven by greats like Shore, Sternfeld, and here by Ghirri. 

Luigi Ghirri

Photo I was afraid to take

focus on me

Artist

Sean Lotman 

Sean uses "dreamy" colors and soft tones to convey a sense of surrealism. A lot of his photos appear to be snap-shot like, but still remain intentional in the composition and subject. "As I shoot mostly strangers, a lot of my photography is based on pure chance. But it’s manageable if you know where the best places to shoot are and when you get your light. It’s usually a roll of the dice so it’s exhilarating when you get lucky. " I really want to try and get into color 35mm film, so seeing his work is helping me gain ideas.