Stephen Shore - Research Task 1
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- Stephen Shore was born on 8th October 1947 in New York. Today he is 68.
- At ten he received a copy of Walker Evans's book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. At seventeen, Shore met Andy Warhol and began to frequent Warhol's studio
- His awards and grants include: 2010 Royal Photographic Society, Honorary Fellow 2010 German Photographic Society, Culture Prize 2005 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize, finalist 2005 Aperture Award 1993 MacDowell Colony 1980 American Academy in Rome 1979 National Endowment for the Arts, publishing grant 1977 National Endowment for the Arts, project grant 1975 Guggenheim Foundation 1974 National Endowment for the Arts
- Shore embarked on a series of cross-country trips, making "on the road" photographs of American and Canadian landscapes. In 1972, he made the journey from Manhattan to Amarillo, Texas, that provoked his interest in colour photography. Viewing the streets and towns he passed through, he conceived the idea to photograph them in colour
- His photos have documented America and Americans —this includes streetscapes and architecture shot to reveal them as abandoned film sets, and cryptic vérité portraits of people he meets
- “I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.” - Stephen Shore
- "A photograph has edges, the world does not." - Stephen Shore
- "If Stephen Shore were known just for the iconic photos he shot as a teenager at Warhol’s original Silver Factory, he’d probably still get a place in the history of photography" - Steve Lafreniere speaking about the work of Stephen Shore
Research Links
http://stephenshore.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Shore
http://www.303gallery.com/artists/stephen_shore/
http://stephenshore.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Shore
http://www.303gallery.com/artists/stephen_shore/
Research Task 2 - Gregory Crewdson
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- Gregory Crewdson was born on September 26, 1962 in Brooklyn, New York. He went on to attend John Dewey High School, where he graduated early and eventually moved on to study photography at SUNY Purchase, close to New York.
- Crewdsons’ father worked as a psycho-analyst and it has been said that his love for deep psychological meanings in his photographs has come from an interest in his father’s work.
- Crewdson has often said that films such as 'Vertigo',' The Night of the Hunter' and ' Close Encounters of the Third Kind' have all greatly influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.
- Crewdson has been recognised many times for his contribution to the world of photography, winning awards such as the Skowhegan Medal for photography, a Nation Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists fellowship and the Arts Siskind Fellowship.
- His photographs are usually taken in small towns in America but are often dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing and surreal events, where the photograph is elaborately staged and lighted. Setting up these photographs often use crews familiar with film production, often using motion picture film equipment and techniques.
- Crewdson once said in an interview, when talking about his work:
- "My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear" - Gregory Crewdson
- As of his father’s profession, Crewdson has come to be very interested in the psychology of his work and his photographs often explore a darker side to photography.
- Usually, Crewdson shoots his photographs in small town America, rarely going beyond America’s borders to shoot his photographs
- Crewdson has contributed greatly to the photography world. He gave permission for photographers and artists all over the world to give deep psychological meanings to their work in a theatrical and cinematic way.
- “If you could freeze a moment, in your dream and really look at it in detail… you almost feel that that would be what you would find one of Gregory’s images” – Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art
- “I think my pictures are really about a kind of tension between my need to make a perfect picture and the impossibility of doing so. Something always fails, there’s always a problem, and photography fails in a certain sense… This is what drives you to the next picture” – Gregory Crewdson
Research Sources
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Crewdson
2) http://www.gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson
3) http://anthonylukephotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/photographer-profile-gregory-crewdson.html
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Crewdson
2) http://www.gagosian.com/artists/gregory-crewdson
3) http://anthonylukephotography.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/photographer-profile-gregory-crewdson.html
- Leiter received his first camera from his mother at the age of 12. He developed an early interest in painting and was fortunate to meet the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart. Leiter moved to New York in 1946 intending to become a painter but through his friendship with Richard he realised his creative potential to become a photographer.
- He sought out moments of quiet humanity in Manhattan, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances. His work shows the spontaneous unfolding of life on the street with Leiter adding an unconventional sense of form and brilliantly using improvisational, and almost abstract, use of colours and tones.
- Saul Leiter has made an enormous and unique contribution to the world of art and photography. His innovative, abstract compositions and painterly approach to early colour photography set him apart from his contemporaries in the 1950’s.
- “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera.” – Saul Leiter
- “ A window covered with raindrops interests me more than a photograph of a famous person” – Saul Leiter
- “Mr. Leiter captured the passing illusions of everyday life with a precision that might almost seem scientific, if it weren't so poetically resonant and visually layered.” - Art critic Roberta Smith, 2005
Research Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Leiter
http://www.innogreathurry.com/InNoGreatHurry/AboutSaul.html
http://www.arthamptons.com/meet-saul-leiter/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Leiter
http://www.innogreathurry.com/InNoGreatHurry/AboutSaul.html
http://www.arthamptons.com/meet-saul-leiter/
- Adams was born May 8th 1937 in Orange, New Jersey. (aged 78)
- He learned photographic technique from Myron Wood, a professional photographer who lived in Colorado.
- In 1949 he contracted polio at age 12 in his back, left arm, and hand but was able to recover. His family moved to Colorado as of his chronic bronchial problems in an attempt to help alleviate these problems. He continued to suffer from asthma and allergy problems. Despite illness Adams gained a PHD in English and later became a prevalent figure in the world of Photography.
- For decades, Adams has been capturing the heartland of the US, its prairies, skies, rivers, its creeping suburbs and its shopping malls. He has recorded the natural beauty and palpable silence, and the deterioration of that beauty by industrialisation, consumerism and pollution.
- Adams has been awarded many Awards and Fellowships. They include: 1973 - Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 1973 - Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 1978 - Photographer’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 1980 - Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.1982 - Peer Award from The Friends of Photography, San Francisco.1987 - Charles Pratt Memorial Award. 1994 - MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. 1995- Spectrum International Prize for Photography from the Foundation of Lower Saxony. 2009 - Hasselblad Award.
- Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, said "his subject has been the American west: its vastness, its sparse beauty and its ecological fragility. What he has photographed constantly – in varying shades of grey – is what has been lost and what remains" and that "his work's other great subtext" is silence.
- "In common with many photographers, I began making pictures because I wanted to record what supports hope: the untranslatable mystery and beauty of the world. Along the way the camera also caught evidence against, and I eventually concluded that this too belonged in pictures if they were to be truthful and useful." – Robert Adams
https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/robert-adams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer)
- His full name is Jean – Eugene – Auguste Atget.
- Atget was born on 12th February 1857 in Libourne, France and died on 4th August 1927 in Paris, France (aged 70)
- His nationality was French.
- His parents, Jean – Eugene and Clara – Adeline died shortly after his birth, meaning he was brought up by his maternal grandparents in Bordeaux.
- While living in Paris, Eugene became an actor with a travelling group, performing in the Paris suburbs. He met actress Valentine Delafosse Compagnon, who became his companion until her death. He gave up acting in 1887 because of an infection of his vocal cords with his first photographs emerging the following year.
- By 1890 Eugene was a professional photographer, supplying documents for artists: studies for painters, architects, and even stage designers.
- He is most famous for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization - a project that he would pursue tirelessly for 30 years. As of this most of his work was taken in Paris.
- "A good photograph is like a good hound dog, dumb, but eloquent" - Eugene Agtet.
Research Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget
http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/bio.shtm
http://www.atgetphotography.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Atget
http://www.nga.gov/feature/atget/bio.shtm
http://www.atgetphotography.com/
- Robert Frank was born on 9th November 1924 in Zurich Switzerland. He is now aged 91.
- Frank states in the 2005 documentary "Leaving Home, Coming Home" that his mother, Rosa, had a Swiss passport, while his father, Hermann originating from Frankfurt in Germany, had become stateless after losing his German citizenship as a Jew. They had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression.
- He turned to photography, as a means to escape from is surroundings and trained under a few photographers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar.
- Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography.
- His awards include 1955: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1996: Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography from the Hasselblad Foundation. 2002: Edward MacDowell Medal, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH.
- “My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and I do not anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint. However, I feel that if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has been accomplished.” – Robert Frank
Research Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/robert_frank.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frank
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/robert_frank.html
- His full name was Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Bresson was born on 22nd August 1908 in Chanteloup-en-Brie, France
- He died on 3rd August 2004 in Monjustin, France (aged 95)
- He is considered by many modern day photographers as the master of candid photography and was an early user of the 35mm film
- Bresson helped develop the art of street photography
- He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three naked young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. This photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, "I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant."
Research Task 8 - alex Stoddard
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- Alex was born on 15th November, 1993 in Jacksonville, Florida, United States. He is now 22 years old.
- Stoddard discovered photography at the age of 16 in his back garden in Georgia. Sneaking his mom's camera out of her room to take self-portraits in the woods behind his house, he began sharing his work on the popular social media website, Flickr and within a year's time gained a following of tens of thousands. His following escalated dramatically during his 365 Project in 2011, where Stoddard took one self-portrait every day for a year. On referencing his project, he says, "I spent most of the year that I was engaged in the project by myself, so I had a lot of time to delve into my own mind and really come to know myself." His photos during this time were widely recognized by many media outlets such as ‘My Modern Metropolis’ and ‘Refinery 29.’
- At the moment, Alex has not yet won any awards, fellowships or grants.
- "Each time I would go out to take a photograph, I would spend most of my time analysing the scene, taking in every aspect – where the light was coming from, how the background would contribute or distract from the subject". – Alex Stoddard
- Alex typically uses a Canon 5D Mark II to create his images.
- Alex Stoddard’s work focuses on the human form and the process of infusing it with natural surroundings. He also strives to create whimsical and surreal portraits.
- When talking about his inspiration Alex said “I firmly believe that inspiration comes from an individual’s collective experiences and memories. I can base a photograph around an event that was significant and turbulent in my childhood just as easily as I can base one around a fleeting moment that seemed trivial at the time, a moment that has somehow buried itself in my subconscious, only to be awakened or triggered by a certain sound, smell, or sight. That being said, I find a lot of inspiration in my own childhood memories.”
Research Sources
http://alexstoddard.format.com/
http://seamlessphoto.com/beinspired/2013/08/alex-Stoddard/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Stoddard
http://alexstoddard.format.com/
http://seamlessphoto.com/beinspired/2013/08/alex-Stoddard/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Stoddard