GELLAGE- Michal Macku

 

 Michal Macku is a Czech photographer who is using his own photographic technique called “Gellage” which is                       a combination of collage and gelatin. Since the end of 1989, he was developing his technique and recently he become well-known in photography world. The technique consists of transfer the exposed and fixed photosensitive emulsion from its original base onto paper.  Afterwards the transparent gelatin substance is being moved, reshaped and the images gain different meaning.  It  results in an impressive and spectacular effects. All the prints are made on photographic quality paper and each Gellage is ready to be exhibited.

Each print is an original work of art as the process is very complicated and sometimes it includes the use of more than one negative per image. That makes it almost impossible to produce identical prints. Macku uses nude human body in his works, mostly his own.

“Through the photographic process [of Gellage], this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions. This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work”. He says that he is always seeking new means of expression and then gradually he discovers unlimited possibilities through his work with “loosened gelatin”. Maku’s work places human bodies in new situations, new contexts, new realities “causing their authentic reality to become relative”.

He is interested in questions of moral and inner freedom as he states. “I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it”.

 

Compilation of Macku’s work along with music:

Bibliography:

http://www.michal-macku.eu/

http://www.volakisgallery.com

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

 

DiCorcia was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied at the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and then  Yale University where he got his Masters of Fine Arts in Photography in 1979. Following his graduation he started exhibiting his works in group shows both in the USA and Europe. He took part in a traveling exhibition organized by Museum of Modern Art in New York. DiCorcia’s style is a mixture of documentary photography and cinematic imaging or even advertising shots. In his images he alternates between reality and fantasy between the natural and staged.  He captures the everyday’s life emotions. The pictures give us an impression as if they were spontaneous shots of someone’s everyday life. However in fact they were carefully planed and staged photographs.

After he made use of his family and friends in photographical terms, he went “onto the street” and started shooting random people in urban spaces around the world. His famous series entitled “heads” contains portraits of passers by “isolated” from the background by the use of a light mounted and hidden in the pavement. The light would illuminate a random subject often without them knowing it.

Because of one of the photographs from this series DiCorcia has been sued for exhibiting someone’s image without permission. That certain someone who sued him was  Ermo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew who claimed that his religious rights as well as his privacy were violated by taking and exhibiting  a photograph of him without his permission.The Court dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the photograph taken of Nussenzweig on a street is art – not commerce – and therefore is protected by the First Amendment.

 

Slideshow of DiCorcia’s images:

Bibliography:

David Zwirner – Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Thousand (February 27 – March 28, 2009) Retrieved on May 10/2010

Luc Sante and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Philip-Lorca diCorcia: Heads, Steidl,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip-Lorca_diCorcia

HDR Photography

 

High Dynamic Range photography allows us to depict the scene more accurately and with wider range of luminance. In simple words HDR image contains much more light intensity levels between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than any other standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods. To produce an HDR image we need to take at least two or three pictures of the same scene with different exposures and then merge them into one image. To get better results we can use even over a dozen images with different exposures ranging from the brightest to the darkest spot of a scene. The camera needs to be set up on a tripod as it cannot be moved a for the best clarity of the merged image.

After merging pictures into one image another operation has to be applied, which is Tone Mapping. This technique reduces overall contrast to facilitate display of HDR images on devices with lower dynamic range.

Information stored in high dynamic range images represent physical values of luminance or radiance. Therefore they reflect better what can be observed in the real world. Unlike traditional digital images, which represent colors that should appear on a monitor or a paper print. HDR image formats are often called “scene-referred”, in contrast to traditional digital images, which are “device-referred”.

Bibliography:

Cohen, Jonathan and Tchou, Chris and Hawkins, Tim and Debevec, Paul E. (2001). Steven Jacob Gortler and Karol Myszkowski. ed. “Real-Time High Dynammic Range Texture Mapping”.

Greg Ward, Anyhere Software. “High Dynamic Range Image Encodings”. http://www.anyhere.com/gward/hdrenc/hdr_encodings.html.

Self portraiture

                                

Self portraiture is a way of meeting an Ego. It is also a certain act of uncovering the identity through finding a ‘real name’. Additionally and most important of all, for me it is an attempt to describe myself as a person, as a distinct personality living in a society, amongst other people. Self portrait in photography does not have to be a picture ‘en face’. It can also be any kind of reflection or even a shadow of the photographer. Some believe that it can represent a ‘part’ of the artist as well, or an object that describes him.

 

2a Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966

Here is an example of unconventional self portrait by Lee Friedlander. It is not  usual as all we get to see is the photographer’s shadow. The artist surprises us with making things not too obvious. So the ‘self ‘ in the image is the shadow, a non-material ‘part’ of the artist, nevertheless that part gives us some sort of impression of himself. Tells us what kind of person he might be.

There is also another self portrait that I want to mention about. It is a more conventional one, although it might be shocking. It’s the Nan Goldin’s “One month after being battered”. Goldin plays with our emotions and wants us to understand her feelings, mood and the emotional state she was in. We usually take pictures at happy times of our lives, but Goldin wants to show us something different that takes place in the society as well, but this is the taboo. And she shows it in a very usual way, there is nothing too ‘fancy’ about that photograph or we could even say it is a bad photograph.

‘The use of seemingly unskilled photography is an intentional device that signals the intimacy of the relationship between the photographer and his or her subject’.

 

2c Nan Goldin, ‘Nan one month after being battered’ 1984

Bibliography:

Charlotte Cotton: The photograph as contemporary art Thames&Hudson, London 2004

Jeff Wall

 

Canadian artist Jeff Wall is one of the leading practitioners of the staged tableau.  He developed his style in the late 1970s and became well known in the late 1980s. He experimented with conceptual art during his undergraduate studies  then he made no art until late 1970s when he produced his first backlit phototransparencies that he became famous for.

Wall is hugely inspired by fine art and such painters as Diego Velázquez, Hokusai, and Édouard Manet or by writers such as Kafka or Yukio Mishima. Many of his images are staged and they refer to the history of art as well as to philosophy. Compositional devices used for the image called “Insomnia” are similar to Renaissance painting. The man lies on a floor in desperation. He is trying to achieve some sleep. “The lack of homely detail in this kitchen is a reflection perhaps of the lifestyle of the character, of his insomniac state, but also of a theatre set viewed from on stage”.

Very often his works require cast and crew as they are  large scale photographic productions, almost like film sets(Dead Troops Talk).  Therefore  he is similar to a film director who controls and leads the process of making an image. Wall displays his images on large light boxes, those similar to street advertisements. It gives his work very spectacular physical presence.

“A light box is not quite a photograph, nor it is a painting but it suggest the experience of both”

 

 Bibliography:

C. Cotton: The Photograph as Contemporary Art. 2004 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London

Vasudevan, Alexander. “‘The Photographer of Modern Life’: Jeff Wall’s Photographic Materialism.” Cultural Geographies Vol. 14, No. 4 (2007)

Nan Goldin

 

 Nan Goldin was born in Washington D.C. on Septembert 12 1953. Very soon her family moved to Boston , Massachusetts. Her sister’s suicide in 1965 have had a big influence on her work. Soon after that horrific event Goldin took up photography so as she could preserve her memories.

A camera started to be her inseparable device. Along with her friends she explored fashion aesthetics and then she got in touch with Boston transvestites. In the early 1970’s she documented and attempted to depict  objectively those people that she really admired for their  special confidence. Soon after she collected those images and published her first book “The Other Side”. After studies at the School of Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston she started using colour photography.

In the 1974 she produced her first exhibition project “Image Works” at the University in Cambridge. Soon after she graduated she moved to New York and started to document the post-punk new-wave music scene as well as gay subculture of the late 70s and early 80s. The subjects of her works were mainly her friends whom she treated as a substitute of her family, as she would later admit.  Goldin’s images are very intimate and they penetrate and expose her friends’ privacies as well as her own. A slide show entitled “A ballad of Sexual Dependency” along with a soundtrack is impressive and emocional.

In the 1988 she withdrew from drugs and began a series of self portraits. Because of the loss of several friend who died from AIDS in the early 1990s she got back to depicting other people. Since 1995 Goldin worked on wide variety of projects including collaborations with other photographers, New York City skylines, uncanny landscapes.  She lives and works in New York, exhibiting her work all over the world and still photographing her closest ones. In 2007 Goldin received Hasselblad award.

 

Interview with Nan Goldin:

Bibliography:

Tillman, Lynne. The New York Times. “A New Chapter of Nan Goldin’s Diary.” 16 November, 2003

Nan Goldin at Pa. Academy of Fine Arts, ARTINFO, December 17, 2005

Feminism-The GUERILLA GIRLS

 

In 1985, a US-based bunch of female artists started a movement that stirred the world of the ‘white, male and Western’ art. In the following years the girls disguised in gorilla masks produced snappy and funny posters, postcards, stickers, books, magazine projects and billboards to speak up about gender and racial discriminations. Their masks form the trademark used as a cover for their ‘basic’ identity. Hidden behind them, they want to draw the attention to the issues that bother those anonymous artists. They aim at breaking the stereotypes (Pict. 1) not only through campaigns but also through their own image- very often they confront public opinion through a combination of their disguise with high heels and short skirts. On the other hand, their ‘guerilla’ identities are strongly connected with the history of the female movement in arts, as they use pseudonyms such as Gertrude Stein, Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz. They challenge the norms and unwritten regulations (‘the etiquette’), provoke discussions and promote equality in the crucial areas- the art world, politics and media. Their posters talk about wages, percentage of female artists exhibiting in mayor galleries as well as issues concerning female identity in a world dominated by male views (Pict. 3-4). Why they call themselves ‘the conscience of the Artworld’? Because, as GG1 says: ‘the art world need to examine itself, to be more critical’.

The Guerrilla Girls at the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA

 Bibliography:

 Comp: ‘An Interview’ from The Confessions of the Guerilla Girls, http://www.guerrillagirls.com/interview/index.shtml  -vistited on 28th March 2010

Jan Saudek

 

Born by the beginning of the WW II, Jan Saudek has been put through a lot of pain and horror before he became the most famous Czech photographer. Nazis imprisoned his Jewish-rooted family in one of the concentration camps in Germany. Along with his brother Jan Saudek was detained to a children’s concentration camp. He managed to survive the worst conditions just to find out that his family has been terminated. The brutality and roughness of the war had a strong impact on his later work. Black-and-white, hand-tinted photographs were inspired by grey shadows of the war. Added colours were meant to symbolize people’s attempts to escape the harsh reality, although one can notice elements that clearly reflect his childhood’s experiences. Aspects such as bare plaster walls, or human body’s imperfections are to a certain extent synonyms of war and concentration camps. Inspired by painters such as Balthus and Bernard Faucon, Saudek developed an unique style of erotic photography mixed with ugliness of the surrounding places. His focus was also on the clear differences and the ambiguity between men and women. Throughout his whole life he emerged into a great artist whose difficult life proliferated in his work. I believe that sometimes only reality is able to dare us to be greater than any pain. 

  

 

A trailer of a feature film about Jan Saudek:

     Bibliography:

Jan Saudek (1998, Taschen)           

Pouta lásky (Chains of Love). [Saudek.com]  

http://www.jansaudek.com

Modernism

           Modernism begins between ninetieth and twentieth century. It influenced such fields as: technology, mass media, entertainment, science and art. It is about something new, something that has never existed before. Modernism also states about departure from tradition, tries to forget all that has happened before. It is characterised by the use of new and innovative form of expression.‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world- and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’. In the 19^th century the invention of photography changed the world of images radically. Instead of being painted or drawn the images became ‘machine made’.
In the beginning of 20^th century when the popularity of illustrated magazines and newspapers started to grow rapidly, photography became mass-communication medium. Artists and photographers started to look at that new medium in      a different way. Alfred Stieglitz an American photographer, who is considered as pioneer of modern photography brought that new graphic medium to the same level as high art. He was creating beauty from everyday life, and making statements about the nature of photography, rather than about the world.

Paul Strand and Edward Weston another two American photographers, eliminated the social context by abstracting the reality and emphasizing shape and form. By 1918 Weston’s work became increasingly concerned with abstraction and flatness, and he began to produce his first sharp-focus photographs. Edward Weston is famous for remarkable series of close-ups of organic forms including shells, peppers, onions, eggplants, artichokes and cabbages. In the above picture         a simple vegetable  is transformed into a massive form.

 

Bibliography:

Marshall Berman -All that is solid melts into Air (1982)

William Eggleston

 

William Eggleston was born  in July 27 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee. Hi is considered to be a father of colour photography as a artistic medium to display in art galleries. Eggleston never received a formal education in photography although he attended three universities. Nevertheless, it was during his academic years that he started to be interested in this medium. He was given a Leica camera and was introduced to abstract expressionism. He was hugely inspired by a Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank and by French Henri Cartier-Bresson, especially the book of the latter called “The Decisive Moment”. Eggleston firstly photographed in black and white but in 1965-66 he started experimenting with colour and that became his dominant medium in the late 60s.

Eggleston taught at Harvard in 1973 and 1974. It was during that time that he discovered dye-transfer printing. Dye transfer process is a continuous-tone color photographic printing process, it possesses a larger color gamut and tonal scale than any other printing process.

Some of the most famous works of Eggleston are  results of his fascination with that process. The photograph titled “ The Red Ceiling” is an example of which the author said: “The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I’ve never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood tht’s wet on the wall… A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge”.

Eggleston was the first person that had his exhibition of colour photographs at Museum of Modern Art. After that he got to know Andy Warhol with whom he began a long relationship. Eggleston’s work is characterized by its ordinary subject matter. He has this special kind of ability to find  beauty and striking displays of color  in everyday ordinary scenes.

Album cover for Radio City by Big Star

Album cover for Give out But Don’t Give Up by Primal Scream

Album cover for Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton

William Eggleston talks about his work:

Bibliography:

A biography of the artist William Eggleston from the J. Paul Getty Museum

William Eggleston in the Real World – recent documentary on Eggleston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston