A Modernist

The modernist movement first became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when art, literature and philosophies on life began to change. After the First World War society began to distrust the government and rethink their religion, art began to become more individual, rejecting traditional values. In photography Edward Weston was known typically for his soft-focus pictorialism style exhibiting figurative compositions during the early 20th century, however as he progressed as a photographer he moved onto more complex photography and with the modernist movement beginning to take off he travelled to Mexico and began taking more abstract pictures using mundane and everyday objects such as toys and tree trunks. The pictures he took in Mexico highlighted the cultural revolution. Weston moved back to California in 1926 where he spent years taking photos which made him a main part in the growing modernist movement, along with Peter Krasnow and Imogen Cunningham. They experimented with modernist images such as shells and peppers, projecting everyday items.
Modernism lasted until after the Second World War, with surrealism and Dadaism becoming to take shape, postmodernism took over from modernism. Like modernism postmodernism art has certain elements however these are more extreme and cutting edge. Performance art was created as well as new unique photography.

Wikipedia
google
http://www.edward-weston.com/

The dark mattter

Oil and gas have been hot topics in the news in recent decades. Coal has almost vanished from the region of Europe. Most people have the conception that it doesn’t exist any more, but in fact coal is a major part of the world’s energy. Coal is responsible for more than 40% of the energy produced by humans. In a series of 100 portraits, Russian photographer Gleb Kosorukov has photographed the Ukranian miners on their return to the surface from a six-hour shift underground, amid dust, dirt and artificial light. Most of the miner’s agreed to be photographed for the project.
Kosorukov wanted to make coal visible again, considering also the coalmining has hardly changed over the past 100 or 200 years, where an omnipresent fear of death is still surrounding the old Strakhanov’s mine. Miners face extremes in their profession, and hero in part of their life for knowing that some day, they may never come back from the mine. They regarded themselves underpaid, the production as fallen since soviet times, leaving them working with the same soviet equipment nowadays. The choice of the moment and the precision of the light, as Caravaggio would have concentrated on making his concept on the photographs even more clear and disarming. There faces are hiding behind the coal deposited on their skin, the soft light balances these strong images. The series offer from the photographer is a brilliant concept, he brought to light a dark matter of hundred’s year hold to not forget the important and the sacrifice of those brave men.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/video/2010/feb/13/photography-ukrainian-miners

The Guardian
Wikipedia

Mosaic

The collage is a hold technique based on the combination of images, matched together. Many artists have explored this method creating impressive images, granting to enlarge a project easily and how we can notice with effective results. Nishino's intricate project has seen the artistic painstakingly map out, 10 cities. Every single project that he has made, requires a month long walk, studied for the realization of a unique product. He takes photos from a huge variety of different points of prospective of the city, creating a large piece of work. This landscape collage of London is a patchwork of around 4000 black & white images. From thousands of prospective the viewer can consider many elements and details to look at it. The 3D work created from Sohei Nishino it’s a new way to consider collage as a perfect tool, used like no one ever thought before. The amount of work that he had to spend behind his piece of art is ( astonishing . For this project he had to take 10,000 frames, he then returned to Tokyo where he processed 300 rolls of black & white film and assembled 4,000 images in the final layout that he photographed after to form a single piece.

The Sunday Times

Wikipedia

google 

Less Camera

Susan Derges is an international recognised photographic artist, most often working with natural landscape. She first trained as a painter, expressing an early interest in abstraction. Many of Derge’s works are produced by camera less photogram methods, producing unique one to one scale images. She tuned to camera less photography after experiencing frustration at the way “ the camera always separates the subject from the viewer”. She breaks from a linear chronology to embrace a more intuitive, aesthetic, cyclical and interconnected interpretation. The images produced from degree in 25 years of carrier, follows an alchemical chain of transformative reaction of the 4 elements ( the earth elements ). The result reached by the photographer is a unremarkable set of investigations in many levels, scientific, psychological and spiritual . Derge’s working methods have changed over the years, using both camera-less and camera made photography. On the series “the river taw”, she had to carry the large sheet of photographic paper across the beach in a light tight box. By the light on the moon, and the warmer emotions from shoreline towns, she observed the rhythm of the waves. Each wave creates a different pattern outlined in the moonlight by the foam of water, while waiting for the night waves she illuminated the scene for a millisecond. She created these beautiful art works using the oldest elements of our earth developing beautiful projects fixed by the alchemy of darkness, light and water.

Elemental, Susan Derges
VA museum Exibition
http://vodpod.com/watch/4868319-susan-derges-victoria-and-albert-museum

OIL

Edward Burtynsky created a new form of epic history painting, turning his hasselblad lens to a fever dream. The stunning details from improbable perches, in strange and beautiful colours, with a clinical accuracy pointing at a critique to the civilization.  The nature transformed through the industry is the predominate theme in the work of the Canadian photographer. Through his striking photographs of recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries, refineries, ship breaking, the industrialization of china and the path of oil, he documents the massive human incursion into and upon the earth. Burtynsky has been selected as recipient for the 2011 Mocca Award from Canada, in acknowledgement of his extraordinary body of photography that focuses upon the human impact on the landscape for which he has received widespread national and international recognition. His pictures are highly regarded for their formal and aesthetic qualities as they are powerful and even disturbing documents of the impact that these activities have upon the landscape and the ecology. The photographs have an evidential quality, in the manner of crime scenes. Looking down from above, we see the indications of mastery and control. Burtynsky’s seems one from on high. The detachment of this view imparts a seductive, undeniable power.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_on_manufactured_landscapes.html

Oil, Edward Burtynsky 2001

Art Shadows

Bill Jacobson is well known for a body of work that negates, through the application of a diffusing lens, the specificity of photographic vision in favor of an immateriality of light and form. In the past his black and white pictures of isolated subjects suggested actions, moods, even narratives that were ethereal, haunting, and momentary. If his photographs were likened to poetry, Jacobson would be a symbolist rather than a realist. His first series to feature soft-focus images was 1992-1993’s Interim Portraits. Interim Couples, Songs of Sentient Beings, and Thought Series followed, the last marking Jacobson’s first departure from the human subject. In the body of work that includes 2000’s Untitled, #3830, Jacobson took his camera to the streets of New York and, working in colour, captured the prismatic effects of light washing over the active forms of the city. Untitled, #3830 immediately recalls the palette and compositions favored by Edward Hopper and, as a consequence, seems a messenger – or a memory – from an earlier time. Bill Jacobson was born in 1955 in Norwich, Connecticut. He earned a BFA in Art and American Studies from Brown University 1977 and an MFA in photography from San Francisco Art Institute 1981. Since 1980 he has exhibited extensively in both group and one-person shows. His work is included in such public and museum collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New York Public Library; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

http://www.saulgallery.com/jacobson/statement.html
Wikipedia

Rubbish exposed

                     Midway Project of Chris Jordan

Photography is not only to search Beauty or to tell us events, the clear description of a emotion but it can become a truly denuncia. This is what the Midway Project of Chris Jordan represents. Jordan has developed is project on the Midway Atoll situated on the occidental cost of the Hawaii archipelago. His photos immortalize the dead bodies of thousands birds killed by the plastic hunted in the oceans and seas, in the last decades reaching even the form of a artificial island in the middle of pacific. The series of photos are surrealist, no one would believe of the existence of such a matter. The object ouf our daily life lighters, straws, plastic caps etc. In the second series he doesn’t only photograph the birds, it also displayed the inside of the stomach around the body showing to us  that the first visible layer of plastic was nothing compare to the fully amount digested by the birds. The crime scene style reportage made by Jordan, its a straight way of framing allowing to the viewer to question on the possibility of such horrible circumstance . 

365 days

Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a photographer of wild life most known for his aerial photography. He started after observing landscape from above in hot air balloons, he understood the power of a picture and how to communicate using this means. He became an international journalist after the publication of a photographs book “Lions” in 1983. A-Bertrand is an established reporter of sport, wild life and aerial photography. He was influenced by Sebastiao Salgado, who had made these thematic studies of human life, deciding so to photograph the entire world from above. Since the 1950, he says in his book “New Earth from above”, the world’s economy growth has been phenomenal, so like the world’s population has increased two fold. The energy demand is 5 time greater to day then 1950, plus rubbish. The 20 percent of the population has not drinking water, 25 percent live without electricity, 40 percent lacks of sanitary facilities. A-Bertrand isn’t just an aerial photographer, he’s on a mission to save mankind by teaching us to love our beautiful planet. The collection of photos offer from Bertrand it afford us of a wide view of the global situation showing the abyss between continent’s in a “civilised” in 2009. His mission is mostly a propaganda war, attempt to focus Humanity’s vision not only of the beauty of the planet, but the ways it is destroyed. Is a lesson that we should understood long ago as Bertrand did try to open our eyes to such a brutal condition of a discrimination of human rights. 

The Observer Magazine 2011

Yann Arthus-Bertand, “The new Eart from above”.

http://www.yannarthusbertrand.org/v2/home_us.htm

Hush of the humanity

Carl De Keyzer produced a work entitled “the Trinity” that reminds the faithful evocation of a Christian mystery, where God sacrificed his son to pay for the mankinds. Trinity, triangle, as a geometric figure, loses the metaphysical meaning and become basis of the new art, “the optical triangle”. The triangle or Trinity in Keyzer’s work doesn’t include God in the top of the pyramid yet it shows the redemptive history from a “Tableaux d’Historie”, “Tableaux de Guerre” and “Tableaux de Politique”. In the Tableaux de Guerre, the photographer produced outstanding images in a panoramic prospective, allowing the viewer to create their ideal observation. These images of war zones, are a protest to accuse the world and his consumes, of bringing the evolution steps backwards to “tribal rituals”. The sublime use of landscape in a war concept, improved the idea beside the photo, showing again to his pictorial tribune the banality of horror, protesting against the “ silence of the tribunals” showing the rusty wreckages, the heaps of rubble, the bullet holes, the ruin in the breath taking landscapes where this treasure trove images. The photographs were the woman’s and children’s are queuing to have water from the only source near Orom refugee camp, at the risk of being kidnapped or raped by the rebels. The whole series of “Tableaux of War” shows the misery and devastation of those villages after the madness that they’ve been through , with the hysterical silence, far away to the synonym of peace. All this elements present that the photos wants to point the attention to the same destructive silence that our society is hiding for the sake of the “developed” side of the world.


http://www.carldekeyzer.com/


Carl De Keyzer " Trinity ", 2008

Beside sufference

City of Dalian oil accident, July '10. Lu Guang

                                                                                                                                                    

In July 2010, two oil pipelines exploded in the North-eastern port city of Dalian, China. The damaged pipes released thousand of galleons of oil which flowed into the nearly Harbor and the Yellow sea covering at least 430 square meter. Green peace commissioned photographer Lu Guang went to report the event, receiving a 3rd place for a “Spot new stories” at the World press photo. Lu Guang works mainly in China as a portrait photographer, with the money that he earns from his business, he travels the world aiming to realize his personal project often reporting the misery of life. Lu Guang is a brilliant photographer that has won different prices reporting painful moments of life. In this series of photos, those were taken in Dalian, he photographs the courage of the people that were working in a clearing operation in the oil sea without any precautions. The two oil firefighters, Zhang Lian and Han Xiaoxiong, were attempting an underwater pump during the oil spill clean up operation in Dalian. The two workers were pushed from a wave, missed their balance and Zhang Lian drowned in the oil sea, despite the desperate efforts to rescue both workers, only Han survived. Lu Guang explained in an interview the horrid situation that he had to report and how much he struggled on documenting them two on the verge of dying. Many photos of a dying moment are been displayed and they always been argued on the necessity of take this photos or not. This kind of photos do not offer any pleasure to people, but unlikely the show to us the reality of the events, hopefully taking us a step forward to the unfairness and equality to our world.

http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/

A story of a Woman

Julia Margaret Cameron was a photographer during the 19^th century, who became famous for her Pre-Raphaelite subject, including poems by Tennison, Shakespeare and others. She began her career at her 45^th birthday party, when her daughter bought her a photographic camera. During a period of male dominated society, Julia M. was one of the first female photographers, imposing her style in the English art scene.  She was ridiculed by her fellow artists who would complain about the blur in some of her works, which was caused from intentional long exposure or the camera being out of focus. In this same period activists such as Emmeline Panknurst were trying to show that British women, were more than a domestic servant. The first organized movement in England took place in 1880, at Langham Place Circle.  After 13 years, Madame Cameron became a recognised photographer for her pieces of works, emphasizing even more the equality between male and female, obtaining rights that after, in the late centuries were recognized and established by Margaret Thatcher, who became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the 1979. 

Cindy Sherman, an American photographer produced in the 1981 Center Folds, a work referred to the stereotype of women in movies, making the models look the victims on the eyes of the public male, invoking the violent abuse. Showing another concept of feminism, exposing the fragility of a female being.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Wikipedia
Uel photography Lecture 2011 

The Irony of Photography

New Brighton, Merseyside, from "The Last Resort". Martin Parr

Marin Parr is as a social photojournalism, become famous for exposing the lifestyle of ordinary British people, reflecting the social decline and distress of the working class.  The innovative imagery presented from Parr is always satiric and ironic, for those reason his been criticized but in the end recognised as a brilliant photographer putting is name on the Magnum agencies.  The unusual photographs are showing to the viewer the comic aspect of a human being in every day life. Parr’s photos are often reporting the English life style, mostly in their holidays. The captured “surreal” moment on the sea side, where a woman is sunbathing with her daughter playing next to the digger. She decided to stop on the beach but at only few meters from the road, perhaps, to not move far from the road, expressing her laziness. For Parr the moral atrophy and preposterousness of our daily lives means, we can only find salvation through adopting a certain sense of humour. Parr started as B&W photographer, but one day he woke up deciding to explore and immortalized his shoot in colour. This decision can have many reasons for a photographer, one of them could be the clinical opportunity that only colour can achieve, describing any object token on a frame in is on singularity established from his on colour and therefore the light reaction.

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/01/martin-parr-exhibition-at-co-b.php

The Last Resort: Photographs of New Brighton. Dewi Lewis, 1986.