Lee Friedlander (born July 14, 1934) is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 70s, working primarily with 35mm cameras and black and white film, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of the photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street-signs. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Friedlander]
The larger, dark figure reflected in the shop window is (obviously) the photographer. Friedlander has made many such fugitive and elliptical self-portraits, partly no doubt because of the easy accessibility of the subject, and partly because of his fascination with transparency and reflection in relationship to the picture plane, and partly because such pictures remind him later of where he has been and what it felt like to be there. The small figure in the bright square over the photographer's heart is also the photographer, reflected in a mirror in the rear of the store. The man standing by the Mustang (like the donor in the altarpiece) is merely a bystander, wondering what the photographer might be looking at.
When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.
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The picture shows everyday life overlook which gives mundane image |
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In his work we can see that he uses a lot of street signs in focus, which gives cold impression of picture. |
Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American
photographer known for his deadpan images of banal scenes and objects
in the United States, and for his pioneering use of colour in art photography.
Colour photography had been around since the 1860s but had flourished in
the parts of photography's empire where commerce trumped art. Colour
was found in advertising, fashion and glossy magazines the places where
photography sinned. Worst of all colour was the natural language of the
amateur snapshot. By the 1970s only serious art photographers saw the
world in black and white. For those able to shake off the convention
working in colour proved revelatory.
"What I wanted to do was to keep a visual diary of the trip and started
photographing every person I met, the beds I slept in, the toilets I
used, art on walls, every meal I ate, store windows, residential
buildings, commercial buildings, main streets and then anything else
that came my way and that became the framework for that series. I drove
in rental cars and I don't think that they had tape decks at that point
so it was just 'Top 40' radio or whatever the local radio station was,
religious stations, country and western stations. Sometimes, to
entertain myself, I would recite Shakespeare and, after a couple of
days, I entered a very different psychological state."[Stephen Shore]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/photography/genius/gallery/shore.shtml
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He takes shoots of uncommon places, shows more details and explores the structure.The main subject is in the middle of the frame. |
William Eggleston - Iconic Photographer
William Eggleston, born in 1939 into a wealthy family that lived on a former cotton plantation in Memphis, Tennessee, first became interested in photography in his late teens. He shot in black & white, initially on a Canon rangefinder and from 1959 on a Leica, with his major influences coming from Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. Even in these formative years, he concentrated on everyday subjects in suburban Memphis: people caught off-guard, supermarkets, diners, roadsides, fences and trees.In 1965, he made the decisive change to working in colour and two years later travelled to New York where he met fellow photographers Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, who suggested he should show his work to John Szarkowski at MoMA. Szarkowski saw the potential in the suitcase full of images presented by Eggleston and encouraged MoMA to buy one of Eggleston's prints. Nine years later, Szarkowski organised the one-man exhibition that caused such controversy.
In the intervening years, Eggleston had begun using a process that was to give his work its unique quality. In 1972, he had noticed that a Chicago photo lab was advertising dye-transfer prints as ‘the ultimate print'. When he saw some examples of these prints, he was overwhelmed by the colour saturation and the quality of the ink.
‘Every photograph I subsequently printed with the process seemed fantastic and each one seemed better than the previous one,' Eggleston tells Mark Holborn in the book Ancient and Modern (1992). ‘By the time you get into all those dyes, it doesn't look at all like the scene, which in some cases is what you want.' These prints provided the additional distance from reality that made his images so distinctive and helped Eggleston turn the everyday into the extraordinary.
Eggleston's working methods have barely altered over the years. He says that he simply photographs things he sees around him, as, to him, ‘nothing is more or less important'. He works with anything from a Leica to a medium-format Mamiya Press camera and often photographs without looking through the viewfinder (in Mark Holborn's words, ‘as if he was firing a shotgun').
Another unusual aspect of his working method is that he never takes more than one photograph of a particular subject. He frames his picture quickly and instinctively, presses the shutter and moves on to the next subject.
‘A picture is what it is,' he said, ‘and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.'
http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/how-to/icons-of-photography/535011/william-eggleston-iconic-photographer
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/that-eggleston-photograph/
Ed Ruscha was born in Omaha, USA. In 1956 he moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives. The city continues to be an influence on his work, which comprises painting, drawing, photography and artist’s books. His interest in the vernacular language of advertising, automobile culture and urban architecture led him to be associated with the early years of the Pop art movement, and in 1962 he was included in the exhibition ‘New Painting of Common Objects’ at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the first museum survey of American Pop art. His work has since been the subject of retrospectives at numerous museums.
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| A visual interpretation of Summer |
"When I grew up I just knew that photographers were ... nerds or they were pornographers, there was no real redeeming social value to somebody who has a camera and takes pictures. But then as I started seriously working as an artist, travelling was essential, so I was continually driving back on US66 between here and Oklahoma, when I would take all these gasoline stations" (Ed Ruscha)
Ruscha's 'Twenty Six Gasoline Stations' offered an alternative to the humanist concerns of the street photographers. They were about things rather than about people; surface rather than soul; not the human drama of the street but the taken for granted backdrop against which the drama plays out.
"I was after that kind of blank reality that the subject matter would present. I was met with a little scepticism from some people and usually those people were more intellectual ..., but someone who worked in a gasoline station would say 'Hey, this is great!'" (Ed Ruscha)
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From 'Twenty Six Gasoline Stations', 1996 |
Robert Adams is one of the most important and influential photographers of the last forty years. During that time he has worked almost exclusively in the American West, and, as photography has altered and fragmented, he has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of nineteenth century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose. Precise and undramatic, Adams’ accumulative vision of the West now stands as a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment, while consistently recognizing signs of human aspiration and elements of hope across a particular changing landscape.
http://www.hasselbladfoundation.org/2009-robert-adams/
One of Adams’ most famous pictures is 'Burning Oil Sludge North of Denver, Colorado' (1973). Immobile and silent, hence representative of Adam’s body of work, the powerful picture asks careful attention from the viewer; it needs to be read slowly and intently. The emptiness and calm of the open space stands in contrasts to the dense toxic smoke that arises gracefully in the sky. The unexpected beauty of the dark cloud against the snow-covered Colorado Rockies is awe-inspiring, almost eclipsing the environmental issues around pollution and oil manufacturing.
http://explore.theculturetrip.com/north-america/articles/robert-adams-finding-beauty-in-the-mundane-/
Artist and photographer Lewis Baltz first gained prominence as a central figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s, an influential photographic genre which highlighted, among other things, the effect of human and industrial intervention on the landscape of the American West. Like many other New Topographics artists, Baltz's work is focused on seeking out beauty both in and among detritus and desolation. His 1977 work In Nevada juxtaposes panoramic views of vast horizon lines with photographs of trailer parks, construction sites, and other natural spaces that have fallen prey to urban influence. Likewise, his series 81-91 Sites of Technology showcases the locations where technical research takes place for large corporations such as Mitsubishi and Toshiba. Baltz’s works have been exhibited in such prestigious institutions as Paris's Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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His images are very elegant, clear and fascinating. All has different structure | . |
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This simple image has some question behind.Why the door is open?What we can find inside? |
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