Sarah--wiki art

This article is a little open. I just thought it was interesting what wikipedia had to say about "art".

Article.

Michelle- Weekly Article for September 8

No. 83, Berlin, July 1990 from Pictures on the Street

Celebrating Photographic Garbage

photo-based art by Joachim Schmid

From Lens Culture Online Magazine

Comments:

I like the technique because it relates to preserving memories and the past.... even though the artist is collecting photographs he finds on the street.  

(will add more later)

Art History and the View Camera

After researching the various artists that used the view camera ilearned some very ineresting facts and coincidences that coincide with my particular interests in the view camera as a means to better capture the landscape. As we know, Ansel Adams was among the first photographers to use the view camera to capture landscapes of nature as his art. He used this camera because as we have already learned the view camera is ideal for the greatest amount of detail and depth of field- obviously this is key when capturing a large landscape. Here is an example of His work:

Many Artists continued this legacy of traveling through more rural areas and photographing life and leaving out details such as industry, work, technology, etc. A more recent artist of that like is Claire Richardson. Her work is very intimate and beautiful. Often in book form, each searies tends to have the same color scheme, so that it feels like the photos were taken all in 5 minutes. She documents people as well as places and seems to get to know her subjects well.

Here are some examples of her work:

Looking later down the line through the history of photography it was the artists like Ansel Adams, who paid great attention to detail, particularly from a large-scale perspective were the ones often using a view camera. Another interesting example, is one of my person favorite photographers, Andreas Gursky. Gursky's photographs are both systematic and chaotic in the sence that they are a bit overwhelming because so much seemed to be going on at once yet there is a very clear order to the madness of his images. When his work is compared to the work of Jackson Pollock's, who is similiar in that same way, it becomes astonishingly clear; check it out

The Jackson Pollock Reference is perhaps a bit unrelated to the view camera but this has got to be one of the most peculiar discoveries i have stumbled upon in the history of art, its remarkable how alike the work is!

Lastly I would like to talk about Thomas Ruff, another phototgrapher who used a view camera to often execute his ideas. Alhtough he is most famous for his portraits which are obviously a great with the view camera , again because of the detail, he has some night-time photography which i find not only very interesting but also ties into my personal interests as an artist because the photos seem to share something with the night-time photos i have been taikng around the city, take a look:

final:book &conclusoins

I've decided to present my final project for Junior Seminar Class as a classic accordion style (to match the bellows of the view camera) book. with a special poloroid pack case. The book reads like a film strip of landscapes, progressing to and from an old Polaroid look to a digitized look, from city to country, day to night, etc. The specific images and the specific order are all very symbolic to my photographic process. I start and end with one image, a photo taken with the view camera that symbolizes my overall attraction to images that are old. The image repeats itself throughout the strip as a re-occurring theme; a constant model for inspiration. Beyond that it is also a photo of a playground, which to me symbolizes the idea of revisiting the past, (visiting the places that you once used to play at a s a child.) Furthermore, the re-visiting of an image, weather its because it seems successful or weather i haven't quite figured it out yet I realize that i am constantly going back to images that are old and often times unintentional. Unintentional; not in the way that i accidently take a photo but perhaps that i don't realize what exactly i was, and more importantly why. 

The rest of the photos vary from digital images to regular 35mm film, old and new. There are images that re-occur in my creative process from years ago that are still just as important to me now so i felt the need to include them. Other images are new from my summer backpacking through Europe when i was making more conscious decisions of what to photograph as well as how to continue my examination of the contemporary landscape. 

As for further usage of the view camera, i would like to give it more time although it seems silly, perhaps if i lived 20 years ago everything would be different, its just so expensive and for what im doing it seems that a smaller more accessible camera is best for me. However i am interested in taking shots with the view camera with regular lith film and making some gum prints because the nature of the polaroids really made me think of the way images come out as gum prints. Im really glad that i tried using the camera because if anything it made me re-investigate everything that goes into taking a worthy picture- spending time on the perfect composition especially.

results: instant polaroids

out of 10, these are the 4 poloroids that came out. Definitely a learning experience.  

the view camera and myself

So back to the view camera project. The plan i thought up was reworked when i realized how much money it would cost as well as the importance of aesthetics. I decided on going right into instant color film because the photos being in color are very important to me. Furthermore sheet film (which would have to be developed elsewhere) for the camera for 75$ for 10 sheets. The only possibility was with Fuji FP-100c color instant film ($35.99 for 10 sheets). 

I took the camera to N. American St right below Lehigh Ave because there is this dump that has glorious mountains of trash which so elegantly tower over some over  grown weed-trees behind a rotting tall green fence with barbed wire at the top. 

I was out there for 10-20 minutes just setting up the camera before the first police car stopped by to investigate. The two cops first asked if I was shooting  a movie, then asked if they could be in it, then  remembered that it was against their duties as officers of the law to appear as officers of the law in my movie which i wasn't even making. I had a few more run-ins with other concerned/curious folks of N. American St but thats not really what this blog is supposed to be about is it?

Anyway i wasted about 5 pictures- three are white, one is black, one is blue. I finally got the hang of it  and have about 4-5 pictures that i can work with. I then decided i needed more film now that i am getting the hang of reading the light meter and setting the aperture and shutter correctly.

I go back to calumet ready to drop another $35.99 for another 10 pack of film to find out that i had bought the last pack way back when i was there and the two closest locations were Boston or Japan. With the holiday just around the corner the store was closing early, i had 3 hours to find someone that i semi-knew that would be willing to drive to Cambridge pick up the film and wait about 5-7 hours for me to get there as I had convinced a friend with a car that a road-trip to Boston is just what we need right now. Sadly it didn't happen. 

So because of this I have taken the project in a bit of a new direction. The project is a kind of log of events, images, thoughts, and contemplations all generally about the ideas of large format photography, particularly how its being treated with digital photography, the photographing of the landscape and a few things in between. 

More to come...

more....

After the north philly night time shooting i went to europe for 18 days and shot some landscapes there. There is really only one that i would like to included in this blog because of its dire relevancy to the contemporary industrial landscape and i feel the photo itself works better in a singular setting. Here it is:

This photo was taken in Antwerpen, a Flemish city of Belgium. The 6 cranes are only there now as a sort of decoration, they aren't being used for anything except a place to hang up some holiday decorations. If you look really close (in front of the 5th crane from the left) you can see my traveling partner, Jenna along with out native Antwerpen friend Tony, who took us in and showed us around. Noticing the people really gives you an idea of how colossal this sight was. The cranes were huge!!!! The cranes stood on the edge of the waterfront of the river Schelde.

I may or may not rework the photo to make it fit a bit better in the other images i am showing in this blog. The cranes don't really look isolated as much as thy look cramped. Having the view camera in Europe would have been also very inconvenient considering my backpack was huge already and we were doing a great deal of walking. However, it would have definitely made for a better photograph, as you can see from the curvature of the earth at the bottom.