Responding to “First Priority is to make an entertaining picture” Martin Parr

 -Parr states that most images we see are propaganda, usually consumerist. He wants to show people the funny flaws of the world to make daily life possible. Martin states he his a documentary photographer, and therefore its his responsibility to speak to the times we live in. Personal (often exaggerated) interpretations of the world around him. He plays on the language of commercial photography (flash, bright colours).

-He became interested in photography through his grandfather, and decided he wanted to be a photographer in his early teens. Something interesting that Parr states in relation to his initial interest in photography is that, to be an artist of any kind, you must be obsessed. I think there is a lot of truth to this. When I’m in my more obsessed periods of my practice I find that is when I have my best ideas and make my better work.

-The camera as a way of seeing changes through time.

-Photographing non-conformist chapels: He did this in the 70s. Initially photographed a number of chapels on their anniversaries, then focused on a particular rural chapel. For him this was useful in reconnecting to a sense of community that he possessed in his childhood but had lost later on.

-Parr suggests his black and white photography is more “gentle” than his colour photography. He switched to colour in the early 80s, beginning with his project The Last Resort. He wanted to show the contrast between the shabbiness of this resort/town and the domestic life surrounding it. He says that nearly every artist has just one project that they are really known for, and this is his. I guess that this seems to be true, atleast with the well renowned artists (like Robert Frank and The Americans).

Photographs from The Last Resort:

-“Creating a fiction out of reality.”

-He finds that the middle ground in photography used to be ignored, but states today there is a more personal (and therefore middle ground) approach taken by photographers - like choosing to photograph their own family.

-Parr states that his first priority is to make an entertaining picture, and that there are different things going on in the photographs for those who want to discover it. When he is editing his pictures he likes to chose images with a bit of ambiguity and that capture his contradictory feelings towards a topic. 

-Using a telephoto lens, which is normally associated with journalism and sports photography. A telephoto lens allows you to zoom in very far. He has been using this type if lens on beaches now.

-“To achieve a good photograph you need to take a lot of bad photos. I have many more bad photos than good ones… the thing about photography is you have to be there before it happens. It’s difficult to define how a good picture functions, but you sort of know when it happens.”

-He believes the ideal platform for photographers is to produce a book. 

Girl Culture - Lauren Greenfield

-Girl Culture was a six year project (published as a photobook) by the artist Lauren Greenfield. The project looks at the way that American girls of all ages are affected my American culture.

Link to the book: https://www.amazon.ca/Girl-Culture-Lauren-Greenfield/dp/1452159289

-The project looks at “how the body has become the primary form of expression for girls and women, and the exhibitionist nature of modern femininity.”

-The work is inspired by both memory and current experience of the artist

-“… isolating moments and situations that speak to what girl culture is.”

-Looking at the toxicity of cultural beauty standards

I find Greenfield’s critique of the body as the main expression of femininity really crucial to the purpose of Girl Culture and overall something that I feel is important for me personally to remember as an artist and feminist. I think it is easy to fall back on representing the female body through only its physical characteristics without considering the key emotional and psychological aspects of girlhood and womanhood. 

Photo III - project 2 part 1: Presentation

 

Grete Stern

 Grete Stern (1904 - 1999) was a German-Argentine photographer (worked in Argentina, born in Germany) who helped modernize the visual arts in Argentina.

-Studied in Europe at the Bauhaus School where she met and later married married the Argentine photographer Horacio Coppola. When the Nazi party began to gain power in Germany the couple left for London and then Argentina.

-portraiture and collage. Approaching the typical photographic subjects in unconventional ways. 

Dream No. 7: Who Will She Be?, 1949. Photomontage.

Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, 1949. Photomontage.

Hat and Gloves, 1930. 

Autorretrato (Self Portrait), 1943.

Ilse Bing

 Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was a German Avante-Garde artist and commerical photographer. Bing produced her most well-known work during the interwar era. 

-Bing’s photgraphic style was dubbed “documentary humanism”. 

-In 1959, Bing stated that she “had said all that she had to say with photography” and thereafter chose to focus on drawing and poetry. 

“Her friendship with figures associated with the Bauhaus, including the architect Martin Stam and the photographer Florence Henri, as well as her acquaintance with André Kertész in Paris, encouraged her tendency toward the formalist techniques of modernist photography. Like László Moholy-Nagy, the self taught Bing turned her photographs upside-down and sideways to assess their compositional relationships; like Kurt Schwitters, she was attracted to the banal details of urban living--torn tram tickets, gate latches, and other apparently minor objects.”

       - International Centre of Photography

“I felt that the camera grew an extension of my eyes and moved with me.”

-Isle Bing, (quote pulled from MOMA article on her).

Laundry, Frankfurt, 1929. Gelatin silver print.

Self-Portrait in Mirrors, 1931. Gelatin silver print.

French Cancan, Moulin Rouge, Paris, 1931. Gelatin silver print. 

Germaine Krull

 Germaine Krull (1897-1985) was a Dutch-German photographer and a pioneer of the avante-garde art movement, photomontage, the photographic book, and photojournalism. 

-Krull was part of the Neue Frau (New woman): a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 1800s with influence far into the 1900s. The term was used initially by writer Sarah Grand to describe independent women seeking radical change, later evolving as a general term for the feminist and independent woman. 

Germaine worked as a photographer for the French magazine VU, capturing images from infrastructure to intimate portraits.

The Hands of Actress Jenny Burnay, c.1930. Gelatin silver print.

Untitled, 1923-24. Gelatin silver print.

Advertisement for fashion designer Paul Poiret. 1926. Gelatin silver print, 8 5/8 by 6 1/4 inches.

Iness Rychlik

 Iness Rychlik is a Polish-born artist based in the UK. Rychlik uses her skin condition to imprint patterns/writing/drawings into her skin for her photography. Her art is centred around self-portraits which explore themes of pain, solitude, and vulnerability. Alongside her photographic practice Rychlik has also directed several short films. 

Iness Rychlik, Crooked Little House (2023)

Iness Rychlik, Beyond Repair (2023)

Iness Rychlik, Crumbs (2022)

Aperture: Nan Goldin - The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

 

Nan Goldin, Trixie on the cot, New York City, 1979

“I grew up in a period in which the glue of suburbia was denial. It maintained the culture, the mentality, the outer face. I didn’t accept the myths that families tell themselves and present to the world. I saw very early that my experience could be negated. That I never said that, I never did that, that never happened. I needed to get away. 

I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, an account of what things really looked like and felt like and smelled like. I don’t think I could, at this age and in this body now, live the life that I lived then. It took a certain level of fearlessness, a wildness, quick changes—of clothes, of friends, of lovers, of cities.

When I wonder what people are talking about when they say that the Ballad helped them, I guess that it showed young people there was another way to live, that they didn’t have to swallow the version of the norm that hurt them, that they didn’t feel part of, that was destroying them. The book gave a mirror to kids who had no reflection of themselves in the world around them. They knew that they weren’t alone.”

-Nan Goldin

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

Hannah Höch

 

Hannah Höch, Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, mixed media collage, 114 x 90 cm, 1919-1920

Hannah Höch, Untitled, 48 x 32 cm, collage, from the series “From an Ethnographic Museum”, 1930

Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a German artist known primarily for her collages and photomontages. Höch was trained as an applied artist dealing with pattern making in the fashion industry, of which she began to use these developed skills to explore abstraction, which led later to her photomontages and collages. She is best known for her dada work from around the 20s and 30s, which largely are a reaction to the current state of Germany. Höch was an anti-fascist sociopolitical commentator, whose work, besides exploring politics and the industrial, also made a number of works focused on the ‘neue frau’ (new woman) in which she looked at gender and social roles for women in the ‘new’ and ‘old’ Weimar republic.

photo 1, Painting, Photography, Family Photo albums

     For a (non-class related) series of paintings I am working on at this time (dealing with childhood experience, memory, obscurity, and emotion) I have been using old family photos (taken by my mom) as references for the series. Because of this I have spent a lot of time when home flipping through family photo albums. The pictures I am choosing to reference in this series have a connecting aesthetic theme (most notably atleast partially obscured adults (faces)) I thought I would share some of my favourite photos I have found here, since most will not find new context as paintings.

I like how authentic these photographs feel.

For almost all of these, photo credits to my mom, Natalie Evans.