Assignment 3.1 - Choosing a photographer: Richard Avedon

 After going through the list of photographers I was stuck between choosing to work conceptually with the photographs of Richard Avedon, Sally Mann, or Robert Mapplethorpe, but ultimately decided to go with Avedon because I appreciate the fearless/truthful nature of a lot of his photographs (could be called grungy in their subject on occasion even) contrasted with their high quality. Achieving crisper photos is something I need to work on personally, so I felt that Avedon was the best choice for me.

Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was (primarily) a fashion and portrait photographer based in New York City. Both of Avedon’s parents worked in the fashion industry, which undoubtedly influenced his career. He began his career through fashion photography, and at the age of 22 branched off into freelance work. A lot of his photographers were taken for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon was extremely interested in photography’s capacity for evoking the life of his subjects. He worked with Rolleiflex twin lens camera.

“He was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. He registered poses, attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and accessories as vital, revelatory elements of an image.”

-Richard Avedon Foundation

“My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces.  A good one is full of clues.”

-Richard Avedon

Dorothy Parker, writer, New York, June 17, 1958

Catacombs #02, Palermo, Sicily, 1959

Evelyn Avedon, wife of Richard Avedon, Petit St. Vincent, French West Indies, December 20, 1969

Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981

New York Life #17, Fifth Avenue, New York, October 26, 1949

Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, Davis, California, May 9, 1981

Gloria Vanderbilt, December 17, 1953

Jean Shrimpton, Evening Dress, August 1965

Assignment: Holga

 This assignment was to take photographs using a Holga 120 Camera and create an enlargement from these. I shot two rolls of film for the assignment because I had some trouble getting my exposure times correct. My enlargement is a picture that I took of Sophia working in her studio, and I went with this picture because it had the best exposure of any of my shots (although it was still underexposed). Because the film was underexposed it made developing my enlargement very tricky in terms of creating decent contrast. To help with this I did a lot of dodging and burning on the final print. 

I really like the vignette that the Holga camera creates, so to emphasis it I actually burned the vignette onto the enlargement more-so than it was naturally present. I covered where the film was projecting on the photo paper with a roughly cut piece of cardboard to achieve the grungy black borders, which kind of reminded me of the space between each shot on a roll of film.