Photography Reborn Reading 3

Jennifer Ringley while not a photographer was an early user of the digital camera to capture her day-to-day life in still imagery. Being one of the first web cam users as well for online early blogging type purposes. She began the images while in college (1996) and it ran until she shut it down in 2003 when pay-pal changed some of its policies that would in turn restrict what she did.

Natacha Merritt’s work is similar in style but rather than using images to document her day to day life, in blog type format she chose to focus on a certain aspect of her life to take images from. Image of her after sexual encounters. It is an interesting contrast by only capturing moments from a particular part of her life she is one of the earliest individuals to have an online persona while her as an individual was a separate entity.

Henry Fox Talbot was the British inventor who was one of the first to develop an analog photographic process, the Calotype. He is well known for this as well as a famous dispute over whether it was the Calotype or the Daguerreotype that was the first analog process. History mainly remembers that Daguerre was the first and most famous of the early analog inventors, as Talbot lost much of his support as the daguerreotype became more popular and investors wanted a sure bet rather than to back a competitor that could lose them money.

POW #10

Reading 4

Jeff Weiss is a photographer who has been primarily working on images that examine landscapes and structures along with the relationship between the two for several decades. The work he shows in the book interested me because it demonstrated the idea of nature removing structures form the landscape made by humans over time. One of his other projects is somewhat the inverse Collaboration was a series that used nature to create structures from natural materials. Between the two works I find it interesting that with so many of his projects looking at the conflict between man and nature the possibility of a kind of harmony was explored.

Martina Lopez is another artist who was an early adopter of digital technology to create an image. Focusing less on what the technology could do she used it initially to recreate the types of aesthetics found in old scrapbooks, and collage work. Her other work mainly works to the same ends taking old photographs and manipulating them to fit in her constructed scene but making it apparent that it is edited so that the viewer understands that there was an original meaning.

Simen Johan is a Scandinavian artist whom in the book has images that represent a dreamlike state of people. His more recent work maintains that dreamlike aesthetic, but has a focus on nature. In the series “until Kingdom Come” the animals portrayed are manipulated to seem realistic but always have something that gives away the fake aspects, such as a false color of fur, or an odd grouping of animals.

POW 9

POW 8

Reading 3

Daniel lee began his career with the series shown in the book “manimals”. The work uses digital editing to morph human portraits to resemble animals. A related series is called nightlife. In which a large image is shown of people in a nightclub area with the faces morphed into animals again. Originally I found Lee’s work interesting due to the comparison he makes between humans and animals, but in night life it is taken to another level its is like an examination of humans in their habitat of sorts, and the faces are what allow the connection to be seen in a more literal sense.

Aziz + Cucher is a team of artists made up of Anthony Aziz, and Samuel Cucher much of their work revolves around the human body and its relation to society with a focus on technological advancement. The work shown in the book “dystopia” used digital techniques to remove the sensory organs from the face of a person to remove their identity. The point was to signify that people were losing personal identity in the face of the rapidly developing technological world in which people were anonymous. Their other works also attempt to fuse human elements with inanimate object like their series “interiors” in which they take picture of interiors and layer textures of human flesh which gives the area the appearance of be constructed of people. I am a fan of the dystopia series mainly because I am a fan of the technique used to resemble a loss of identify, it is simple and very visually appealing.

Thomas Ruff is a German artist whose first large series was entitles “portraits” in which he created what are photos you would see at an I.D center very basic even lighting with emotionless expression from the subjects. The work we see in the book is called “nudes” and they are just that they are pornographic images in which Ruff has blurred the image. I found this interesting because with a very basic change Ruff was able to completely change the context of the image. The viewer stops for a moment they look over the same areas they would if it were un-obstructed but the mindset is more analytical than lustful.