Sunday, August 24, 2014
Liesa Collins - Weekly Artist Post
Gideon Mendel
This series that I included by Gideon Mendel is a series of portraits of people in their hometowns that have been destroyed by an environmental devastation. Called "Drowning World" he was able to shoot recent floods in UK, India, Haiti, Pakistan, Australia and Thailand. I am getting into more of a type of photography that has human interaction and participation as a heavy influence and I can't even imagine Mendel asking these people to stand in the disaster and face it head on. The confrontation in the subjects' eyes is also something that gets me. You look at these portraits and immediately feel like complete shit because no matter what you are facing in your life, it is incomparable to these people's lives. And on a compositional sense, the colors are amazing and the reflections reveal something that you can't always see immediately in the frame. Shameless plug: Gideon Mendel will be one of the artists at the Anderson Gallery this fall exhibition. I cannot wait to be surrounded in this work.
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These are beautiful and I'm obsessed with the colors in this series. I'm having a hard time deciding if i like that they're all floods. For example, would it be more interesting if there were other disasters going on? Would they be as successful? I just think it's a little too constricted. Like when people make a series of door photos from a city or something. They're extremely powerful images, but to me seem a little gimmicky.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely agree with Scott about the strength of color in these images. That was the first thing I noticed. Also, I feel like the artist is really great at placing the subjects within the frame. There is a strong sense of foreground, middle ground, and background in all of these, which draws me into each scene.
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