Self Portrait

William Egglestone

William Egglestone
American born 1939

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer who had failed as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted; he enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. As a child, Eggleston was also interested in audio technology.

At the age of fifteen, Eggleston was sent to the Webb School, a boarding establishment on Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Eggleston later recalled few fond memories of the school, telling a reporter, "It had a kind of Spartan routine to 'build character.' I never knew what that was supposed to mean. It was so callous and dumb. It was the kind of place where it was considered effeminate to like music and painting." Eggleston was unusual among his peers in eschewing the traditional Southern male pursuits of hunting and sports, in favor of artistic pursuits and observation of the world around him.

Eggleston attended Vanderbilt University for a year, Delta State College for a semester, and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) for approximately five years, none of this experience resulting in a college degree. However, it was during these university years that his interest in photography took root: a friend at Vanderbilt gave Eggleston a Leica camera. Eggleston studied art at Ole Miss and was introduced to abstract expressionism by a visiting painter from New York named Tom Young.

Artistic development

Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographerHenri Cartier-Bresson's book, The Decisive Moment. First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) describes his first, 1969 encounter with the young Eggleston as being "absolutely out of the blue." After reviewing Eggleston's work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of "drugstore" color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MOMA to buy one of Eggleston's photographs.

In 1970, Eggleston's friend William Christenberry introduced him to Walter Hopps, director of Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery. Hopps later reported being "stunned" by Eggleston's work: "I had never seen anything like it."

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974, and it was during these years that he discovered dye-transfer printing; he was examining the price list of a photographic lab in Chicago when he read about the process. As Eggleston later recalled: "It advertised 'from the cheapest to the ultimate print.' The ultimate print was a dye-transfer. I went straight up there to look and everything I saw was commercial work like pictures of cigarette packs or perfume bottles but the colour saturation and the quality of the ink was overwhelming. I couldn't wait to see what a plain Eggleston picture would look like with the same process. Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one." The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall.... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge."

At Harvard, Eggleston prepared his first portfolio, entitled 14 Pictures (1974), which consisted of fourteen dye-transfer prints. Eggleston's work was featured in an exhibition at MOMA in 1976, which was accompanied by the volume William Eggleston's Guide. The MOMA show is regarded as a watershed moment in the history of photography, by marking "the acceptance of colour photography by the highest validating institution" (in the words of Mark Holborn). Eggleston's was the first one-person exhibition of colour photographs in the history of MOMA.

Around the time of his 1976 MOMA exhibition, Eggleston was introduced to Viva, the Andy Warhol "superstar," with whom he began a long relationship. During this period Eggleston became familiar with Andy Warhol's circle, a connection that may have helped foster Eggleston's idea of the "democratic camera," Mark Holborn suggests. Also in the seventies, Eggleston experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston calls Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward, who has viewed the footage, likens it to a "demented home movie," mixing tender shots of his children at home with shots of drunken parties, public urination and a man biting off a chicken's head before a cheering crowd in New Orleans. Woodward suggests that the film is reflective of Eggleston's "fearless naturalism—a belief that by looking patiently at what others ignore or look away from, interesting things can be seen."

William Eggleston's Guide was followed by other books and portfolios, including Los Alamos (actually completed in 1974, before the publication of the Guide) the massive Election Eve (1976; a portfolio of photographs taken around Plains, Georgia before that year's presidential election); The Morals of Vision (1978); Flowers (1978); Wedgwood Blue (1979); Seven (1979); Troubled Waters (1980); The Louisiana Project (1980); William Eggleston's Graceland (1984) The Democratic Forest (1989); Faulkner's Mississippi (1990), and Ancient and Modern (1992). Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of John Huston's film Annie (1982) and documenting the making of David Byrne's film True Stories (1986). He is the subject of Michael Almereyda's recent documentary portrait William Eggleston in the Real World (2005).

Eggleston's aesthetic

Eggleston's mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include "old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb."

Eggleston has a unique ability to find beauty, and striking displays of color, in ordinary scenes. A dog trotting toward the camera; a Moose lodge; a woman standing by a rural road; a row of country mailboxes; a convenience store; the lobby of a Krystal fast-food restaurant -- all of these ordinary scenes take on new significance in the rich colors of Eggleston's photographs. Eudora Welty suggests that Eggleston sees the complexity and beauty of the mundane world: "The extraordinary, compelling, honest, beautiful and unsparing photographs all have to do with the quality of our lives in the ongoing world: they succeed in showing us the grain of the present, like the cross-section of a tree.... They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world!" Mark Holborn, in his introduction to Ancient and Modern writes about the dark undercurrent of these mundane scenes as viewed through Eggleston's lens: "[Eggleston's] subjects are, on the surface, the ordinary inhabitants and environs of suburban Memphis and Mississippi--friends, family, barbecues, back yards, a tricycle and the clutter of the mundane. The normality of these subjects is deceptive, for behind the images there is a sense of lurking danger."

It may help to compare Eggleston's work to the work of another illustrious Mississippian, William Faulkner, who also drew subject matter from the Mississippi Delta region that is the subject matter of much of Eggleston's art. Both Eggleston and Faulkner drew upon insights of the European and American avant-gardes to help them explore their Southern environs in new and surprising ways. As the writer Willie Morris wrote, Eggleston's "depiction of the rural Southern countryside speaks eloquently of the fictional world of Faulkner and, not coincidentally, the shared experience of almost every Southerner. Often lurid, always lyrical, his stark realism resonates with the language and tone of Faulkner's greatest mythic cosmos of Yoknapatawpha County .... The work of William Eggleston would have pleased Bill Faulkner ... immensely." Eggleston seemed to acknowledge the affinity between himself and Faulkner with the publication of his book, Faulkner's Mississippi, in 1990.

According to Philip Gefter from Art+Auction, “It is worth noting that Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, pioneers of color photography in the early 1970s, borrowed, consciously or not, from the photorealists. Their photographic interpretation of the American vernacular—gas stations, diners, parking lots—is foretold in photorealist paintings that preceded their pictures.”

revised poster for cooper

Everyone is invited......

Here is my picture and poster for Cooper Show. Please comment if you think i need to change anything on it..
thanks

Algebraic Reasoning

the collector

Baby Photography

This week end i had shot some baby pictures. Its my first time shooting any babies. So please give me some suggestions and feedbacks...

The Collector

magda

First try for this assignment.

Chuck Close

Life and work
Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique). In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts.

In 1969 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. His first one man show was in 1970. Close's work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973. One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object.[2]

One photo of Philip Glass was included in his black and white series in 1969, redone with fabulous water colors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

"The Event"
On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was in New York about to give an art award. He begged to present first, went on stage, quickly read his speech and then ran to the hospital. Within a few hours, Close was paralyzed from the neck down. At first the doctors were confused but eventually they diagnosed a rare spinal artery collapse. Close called that day, "The Event". For months Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps. He has relied on a wheelchair since.

However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Eventually Close managed to recover some movement in his arm and legs, and now paints with a brush strapped to his hand. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyper-realist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as mediums to achieve, nonetheless, astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control.

Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic.

Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York.

src. Wikipedia

Kenyan Women Photo Project — visible from outer space

The hip, young French photographer, JR, likes to make his photographs larger than life and visible from afar. His most recent project in the slums of Kenya are designed to be visible from Google Earth satellites as well as from the elevated train tracks that pass by the village twice a day. The intention is to draw attention to the persistent strength of women in these struggling, poverty-stricken areas.

2000 square meters of rusty corrugated metal rooftops are now covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera, which is one of the largest slums of Africa. Most of the women have their own photos on their own rooftop, and the material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season.

The train that passes on the line through Kibera at least twice a day is covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces are pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.

JR is what I would call a 21st century concerned photographer. He wants to call attention to important social problems, and he uses unusual materials and extravagant means to get his message out into the world. He has completed other audacious projects with people in Brazil, India, Cambodia, and other parts of Africa. And he's pasted smiling portraits of Palestinians and Israelis on both sides of the wall that divides them — showing how similar and human those on the other side look in reality.

For more information, check out JR's website. http://28millimetres.com/women/?ke

by jimcasper

The Transparent City

Big cities can sometimes seem like immense visual abstractions. The jam-packed juxtapositions of diverse styles of architecture — all compressed into dense overlapping vertical spaces — can be seen as things of rare man-made beauty.

These soaring glass-walled environments also invite a sometimes perverse delight in voyeurism. Michael Wolf’s new photobook, The Transparent City, captures both of these aspects nearly perfectly in his recent photographic study of downtown Chicago.

Someone described this work as “Hopper meets Blade Runner,” and I might add a third reference: Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Wolf positions himself on rooftops or in the windows of opposing buildings to get the most amazing vantage points for each scene. He waits for perfect light at the time of day when twilight and interior light render the building walls nearly invisible. An incredible large format camera with a 112-megapixel digital back captures and reveals exquisite details. It's a stunning combination.

Midway through the project, which started with its focus on the architecture of Chicago, Wolf discovered that when he enlarged his photos he could actually see what was going on in nearly every window of every building. Indeed, one office worker in a huge building opposite Wolf’s camera was giving him the finger in a gesture of contempt for his supposed spying!

This after-the-fact discovery added a new dimension to the project for Wolf. He started to look inside as well as outside, and to play one aspect against the other. These sparkling, huge photos became complexly rich statements about daily urban life in the 21st century.

Natasha Egan writes in her introduction to the book:

While it has been more common for photographers to glorify Chicago’s unique architecture and environmental context, Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, focusing less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions of architectural styles when visually flattened in a photograph. Unlike the impermeable windows in his Hong Kong pictures, his photographs of Chicago look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment.

But far from titillation, Wolf discovers a rather mundane loneliness in his windows — people staring into computers or gazing at television sets or napping alone in armchairs. Many residents seem numbly isolated in sterile, generic boxes of rooms suspended in the sky away from any kind of grounded reality.

Writer and blogger Geoff Manaugh sees a direct correlation between these photographs and the psychological effect depicted in the 1975 novel by J. G. Ballard, High-Rise. Ballard suggested that the nature of these buildings produces a "new social type." Manaugh continues:

These people have "minimal needs for privacy," living more "like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere" of the building. Like an architectural mood stabilizer — or spatial Prozac — the building itself gives rise to an "unemotional personality," someone who spends time "waiting for something to happen" while doing nothing themselves.

Wolf accentuates this feeling of alienation and "no exit" with tight cropping of each photograph, so it is difficult to find any reassuring context even in a vast panorama. “You can never go off the building surface and find the sky,” Wolf says. “I make these images so that the only escape is to peer into one of the windows.”

It is especially disturbing to realize that these are the kind of views that urban dwellers experience every day.

The book is beautifully printed in a large, luxurious format on beautiful paper. Three insightful essays accompany the photographs helping to make the entire experience very rich and rewarding. Recommended.

— Jim Casper

The Transparent City

by Michael Wolf

Heavy Light

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan provides a subjective and lively glimpse into contemporary Japanese lens-based art. In this book, Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku showcase the work of thirteen Japanese artists who participated in the 2008 ICP exhibit of the same name.

Heavy Light unites different generations of photographers working with different techniques, such as cityscapes, kitschy portraiture, video installations and fantastically-staged scenes. In their introduction, Phillips and Fuku explain that their focus is on three themes: urbanism and nature, individual versus collective identity, and the relation of the adult to the child. While these ideas seem relevant to almost every culture, in the pages that follow, the reader learns how the Japanese, specifically, address these conflicts.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa, for example, turns to vegetables. In Ozawa's series "Vegetable Weapon," female models pose with guns constructed from ears of corn, carrots, heads of lettuce, peppers and leeks. Ozawa combined his personal interests in eating, cooking, and women, with an external eye on the world's violence, creating a juxtaposition that provokes laughter along with pensiveness.

Perhaps better-known and slightly more conventional are the portraits by Hiroh Kikai. For decades, Kikai has taken street photographs of people passing by a temple in Asakusa. Kikai provides brief character sketches in his captions, such as, "A maintenance man for industrial dishwashers" or "A man who said he'd just had a drunken quarrel." His raw, honest images convey the personal preoccupations of the quotidian Japanese passers-by.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imaginative and unsettling photography of Miwa Yanagi. Yanagi stages intricate, black-and-white reenactments of traditional fairy tales. In "Gretel," a dazed young girl chews the finger of a veiny, spindly arm. Yanagi explores the antagonistic and ambiguous relationship between the characters.

One of the great things about this compendium is the revealing interview with each photographer. In addition to being able to see an overview of their work, we get to know the personality and ambition of each photographer through this conversational exchange.

Asako Narahashi, for one, explains how she went from creating B-movies to shooting photography with her "eyes deliberately out of focus." She made her ethereal urban landscape series "half awake and half asleep in the water" without once looking into the camera's viewfinder. In her interview with Fuku, she remarks, "I choose a spot, go into the water, snap the shutter, and leave the rest to the camera. It's like I say, 'Okay Mr. Camera, treat me well!' I also pray that the camera doesn't break." Narahashi's humility underlines her creative genius.

The book also includes the work of Makoto Aida, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Kajitani, Midori Komatsubara, Yukio Nakagawa, Tomoko Sawada, Risaku Suzuki, Kenji Yanobe and Masayuki Yoshinaga. Heavy Light makes for a great introduction to the recent and contemporary photography scene in Japan -- from quirky to serious images, all rooted somehow to the history of Japanese art.

— Hilary Moss

Heavy Light:

Recent Photography and Video from Japan

by Christopher Phillips and Noriko Fuku

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986

Thousands of contemporary photographers and photography-lovers know Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss as the high-energy couple who curate, organize and host FotoFest, the world’s best international photo festival and portfolio review that takes place every two years in Houston, Texas.

Fred and Wendy are also happy globe-trotters, constantly traveling around the world to participate in photography festivals, conferences and portfolio reviews — looking at new work, encouraging promising photographers, and helping to introduce like-minded people to each other wherever they go. They are highly-respected and well-loved by many, many people in the world of photography.

What comes as a pleasant surprise, however, is to discover the tremendous photographic output that the two have generated themselves, over the past 40 years, working individually and together as photographers, journalists and activists for human rights and social justice. A retrospective of several photographic series that they made in the United States is being shown for the first time at the large and wonderful new wing of Le Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium.

Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986 is an extended look at cultural and political life in the United States over nearly three decades of change and stability. A book of the same title has been published to coincide with the exhibition.

The work on display touches on some of the most important historic events of the last half century in the U.S. — the Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan, Vietnam War, American drug culture, Feminism, and local and national politics, to name a few. They traveled with and photographed well-known figures from that era, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

Beyond the big stories, they immersed themselves in local issues in various parts of the South. They documented rural life, poverty, and the struggles for survival and dignity in small communities throughout Texas over an extended period of 13 years of self-initiated investigations.

The photos are rich in humanity, and very quiet in drama. They are not typical news photographs. Instead, they reveal complex stories in a matter-of-fact way that is quite refreshing. Xavier Canonne, director of the museum in Charleroi who spear-headed this retrospective, writes in his introduction: "The subjects photographed in each area were not predefined by the photographers. Instead, they worked in concentric circles, discovering and recording moments of daily life, the evidences of social class, and the ceremonies – religious, scholarly,social and sportive – that shape collective existence and reflect its origins. Everything in this work has informative value: people’s dress, their hair, their food, their way of standing in front of the lens or ignoring it...”

In an excellent interview, Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss talk about lots of issues, and they speak articulately and passionately about their personal beliefs. When asked what lessons they learned from their long journey in Texas, Wendy replied:

In all these works, there is an understanding of the importance of history and the record of that history. We have a deep understanding of the depth of human struggle and the need to continually document, expand the memory of this struggle and move forward with it.

What is depicted in these works is still relevant to U.S. contemporary history. With the Civil Rights Movement, one of the young African American men who assisted Fred in working with the Civil Rights Movement in Savannah was the first black student to integrate Armstrong Junior College in Savannah. This man is now Mayor of Savannah. This story is very relevant to the current U.S. presidential election and what Barack Obama says he stands for.

The realities and results of the Vietnam War interconnect with much of what is happening to U.S. soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – and certainly the official treatment of veterans’ health and psychological problems related to these wars and the first Gulf War. Once the visible combat wounds are treated, and hopefully, healed, current treatment of U.S. veterans is not dissimilar to what happened to U.S. veterans during and after the Vietnam War. This is especially true with post-traumatic stress syndrome problems, brain injuries, and immune system problems associated with the use of depleted uranium weaponry.

Certainly, the histories and ways of life we photographed in Texas 20-30 years ago continue to be relevant to contemporary political and social developments in Texas and the United States.

This exhibition, and the book, are important reminders of the power of photography (and personal activism) and how it can affect positive change, directly or indirectly. Anyone who is interested in the history of the United States, human rights, and documentary photography will find value in this work.

— Jim Casper
Looking at the U.S. 1957-1986January 24 to May 24, 2009

Photographs by

Wendy Watriss & Frederick C. Baldwin

Portraits @ Cooper

The Body as Billboard: Your Ad Here

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Published: February 17, 2009

TERRY GARDNER, a legal secretary in California, returned home from work recently to find two police officers waiting. They said her brother had told them he thought she might be having a breakdown because she had shaved her head.

Ms. Gardner, 50, said in a telephone interview that she had told the officers that she was fine and had shaved her head for an advertising campaign by Air New Zealand, which had hired her to display a temporary tattoo. She turned around and showed them the message, written in henna on the back of her head: “Need A Change? Head Down to New Zealand. http://www.airnewzealand.com/.”
Ms. Gardner was among 30 of what the airline calls “cranial billboards.” For shaving their noggins and displaying the ad copy for two weeks in November, they received either a round-trip ticket to New Zealand (worth about $1,200) or $777 in cash (an allusion to the Boeing 777, a model in the airline’s fleet).
Jodi Williams, director of marketing for Air New Zealand, said half the participants selected the flight, because many were either New Zealand expatriates or, like Ms. Gardner, had visited and wanted to return. The participants were, in marketing parlance, ideal brand ambassadors: when co-workers or strangers behind them in the grocery store line asked about New Zealand, they could speak enthusiastically right off the top of their heads — so to speak.
Peter Shankman, author of “Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work — and Why Your Company Needs Them,” applauds the airline for the “Tom Sawyer handing out paintbrushes” approach.

6 Painters and Photographers....

P A U L S T R A N D

"I've always wanted to be aware of what's going on around me, and I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time."

~ Paul Strand

D A V I D L E V I N E

I liked the way this artist makes portrait. It really draws attention of the viewers. It also shows the personality as a whole which viewers will remember for years..

I tried some .....

A D O L F W O L F L I

The way he put pictures in the middle of his art draw my attention and i think its really cool. I agree it will distract viewers from the picture when we look at this picture first but as a whole it will draw attention of viewers as an artistic frame or matting.

A N D Y G R I F F I N

I found this photographer in Internet. I liked his portraits very much so i am including him over here. I liked his way of blending portraits with background very much.

W R I G H T M O R R I S

I always like dynamic shape and lines in photographs. I think it also draws attention from the viewers. Angle from which he takes photograph makes really solid objects with dynamic shape which i liked about this photographer.

P H I L I P P E H A L S M A N

This photographer uses different techniques to portrait different people. Some of his portrait is very straight forward portrait but some we can find with lots of movement in it. I liked the light settings and simplicity of his portraits.