Weekley Post: Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange is the photographer I chose for my blog post.  A lot of the general public is familiar with her work.  Dorothea Lange, was very active during the Great Depression in America documenting the state the country was in during that time.  She photographed a lot on the streets and migrant workers, sharecroppers, and families on farms.  But her photographs showed the effects the Great Depression had on America and you can see it in her subjects faces.  Her most famous piece is migrant mother that photograph alone speaks volumes of what people went through during the Depression. 

Weekly Post: Christopher Rimmer

Christopher Rimmer's Series Signs of Life explores abandoned mining towns in Africa, towns such as Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop, places that were once wealthy and populated due to the diamond mining industry. These areas are now completely devoid of residents.

What fascinates me about these photographs is the kind of beauty that these places retain, despite them crumbling from abandonment. These buildings are slowly being taken back by nature, and these photos capture a sort of in-between, a meeting point between human creation and natural process. Both the buildings, the human made part, and the sand, the nature made part, of these photos exhibit a peaceful sense of change that compliment each other.

weekly post: Tim Walker

Tim Walker is a fashion photographer from London.  He specifically constructs every aspect of each photograph.  The lighting is beautiful and a big part of each photograph. The amount of detail in every prop, color, lighting, setting, and composition really captures my attention. Walker creates photographs that could only exist in a fantasy.

Weekly Post: Alberto Lizaralde

Alberto Lizaralde's covers a 5 year period of his life where he chronicles, as he puts it, "good times and bad times that will timelessly be repeated." The images start off benign enough with some tender moments but the main body of the work seems more like the "bad times."

The book is set up to form a classical narrative structure in three acts. The book deals with the halfway point between fiction and reality; continuously crossing the line between documentary and the imaginary, the true and the false, the personal and the unfamiliar. It is also a combination of images he has taken and found images that illustrate a particular hardship. The most compelling of these is the photo of teeth with the fold and tear through the middle of it.

For the book cover, a special ink has been used that changes color with the heat of your hand and leaves fingerprints when touched. In this way it becomes a living book, which mutates in a unique and personal way depending on who has it in their hands, making the viewer feel that the inside could also be their story.

Sofie Knijff by Stephanie

Journalist, Mali

Actress, South Africa

Businessman, India

Engineer and Architect, India

Policeman, India

Singer, South Africa

Harry Potter, India

Belgian-born photographer Sofie Knijff has spent the last three years traveling the world making portraits of children and asking them one question: what do you want to be when you grow up? With limitless imagination the children answer, dressing up as their future selves in a series she calls Translations. By using similar backdrops for each child, Knijff strips them of their current surroundings in order to focus more intimately on their “dream characters.”

I found this series to be so inspiring, the fact that the children have used their imagination to become these dreams and how they imagine those professions to look like, gives me hope. Most of the countries that Knijiff visited are saturated with poverty and yet in all the glum there's light and hope and HUGE dreams that come out of it, that there is no possible way (in my head) that makes me believe these kids can't become what they dream of - even the Harry Potter kid. The soft lighting handles the subjects and the dream so delicately throughout the series. The expressions on the kids faces are of certainty that they already are what they say they want to be! Very enlightening and inspiring. 

Weekly, Philip-Lorca diCorcia

 

To create his Heads series, diCorcia rigged a powerful strobe light to a scaffold high above the street in New York’s Times Square. He activated the strobe by radio signal and captured unwitting pedestrians in a flash of light from over 20 feet away. Remarkably, the strobe was imperceptible to his subjects since the photographs were taken in broad daylight. Using this technique, the figures appear to emerge from inky darkness, spotlighted and haloed and as if there was almost no distance between the camera and the subject. Over the course of two years diCorcia took more than 4,000 of these photographs, though he chose only 17 for the series.

DiCorcia’s Heads series was at the center of a debate between free speech advocates and those concerned with protecting an individual’s right to privacy. In 2006, one of diCorcia’s subjects sued the artist and his gallery for exhibiting, publishing, and profiting from his likeness, which was taken without permission. While critics claim that the project violated his subjects’ right to privacy, diCorcia explained that he did not seek consent because, “There is no way the images could have been made with the knowledge and cooperation of the subjects.”

Weekly Post: Hannah Price by Jessica Fee

Hannah Price takes portraits of men that "catcall" at her on the streets. Emerging photographer Hannah Price reverses the power of the male gaze by photographing men who catcall her. Originally hailing from Colorado, Price moved to Philadelphia after completing her undergraduate and was immediately struck by the loud comments she received while going about her day. Repeatedly running into the same demeaning experience, Price decided to turn her camera on those who shouted after her, transforming the jeer into an exchange. The images feel bold and unmasked, their abrupt manner reflective of the uncomfortable discourse taking place.

Though she does not believe her response causes these men to reconsider their actions, she feels that documenting the encounter allows her to take control of the situation, turning the attention to their behavior rather than her physical appearance. Claiming that the series is neither a judgment on men or a comment on race, the MFA Yale candidate uses her photography as a means of understanding something unfamiliar, hoping to find some sort of common humanity in the process.

This project is a work in progress documenting a part of my life as an African-Mexican-American, transitioning from suburban Colorado to consistently being harassed on the streets of Philadelphia. These images are a response to my subjects looking at me, and myself as an artist looking back. — Hannah C. Price

Another Photographer, or really a campaign leader that I thought was interesting is, Christopher Hunt. This campaign uses the world’s most popular search engine (Google) to show how gender inequality is a worldwide problem. The adverts show the results of genuine searches, highlighting popular opinions across the world wide web. — Christopher Hunt

UN Women, a branch of the United Nations focused on gender-equality, recently launched a simple campaign that became viral. ‘Auto Complete Truth’ is a series of ads using actual search terms from Google’s auto-complete feature. Though key words may vary from country to country, many of these frequent searches originate from the United States. Campaign creator Christopher Hunt’s bold approach and clever placement of the search bar is a powerful reminder of how archaic mindsets silence women. UN Women and Hunt plan to expand the campaign in light of its’ overwhelming response.

Weekly Post: Russell Jones

Daniel Shea

Daniel Shea's work focuses on the coal mining country of West Virginia and Southeastern Ohio. He photographs the lives of the workers and the affects of mountaintop removal, where the top oh hills and mountains is blasted off in order to access the coal veins deep within.

These photographs are very desolate to me, both in subject matter and in the formal aspects of the photographs, such as the lack of bright energetic colors. They represent both a place that is aging due to a decline in the industry and of the destructive processes that are used in order to mine coal.