Photography Through My Own Lens

     Sebastiao Salgado is a photographer from Brazil. He grew up on a large farm with at least thirty families (The silent drama). Salgado is considered a social photographer because of his commitment to long-term projects including Workers from 1993, Migration from 2000, and Genesis from 2013. In all of these series, Salgado provides his social commentary on indigenous people, forgotten lands, and the unique hardships in different cultures. Overall, I really enjoy Salgado's work. I think a large part of it has to do with his compositions, the wide depth of field, but also a description of Genesis that said it "documents the world's forgotten people and places" (The silent drama). It's a unique idea to photograph indigenous persons experiencing things like hunger and saying they are forgotten. You would think that people suffering from starvation would be helped and remembered, but Salgado shows in these series the beauty of life and the level of ignorance for la...

American photographer Arnold Newman is best known for his work in environmental portraits. His work differed from normal portraiture because instead of just sticking with a head shot, he would bring his subject into an environment that represented who they were and what they did, and their personality. A prime example of this would be the environmental portrait of Alfried Krupp, an industrialist who had connections back into Nazi Germany. In this portrait, Newman asked Krupp to lean a bit more forward causing ominous, dastardly shadows to appear on his face ("Arnold Newman"). The portrait framed him for the grimy, evil man that he was, and Krupp hated that. From reviewing his work, Newman has a habit of going back to minimalism as well as symmetry. You can see this all the way back to his earliest photographs made in West Palm Beach. Out of all his work, one photo that really stuck out to me was his environmental portrait of Igor Stravinsky shown above. I hated this photograp...

  Ralph Gibson began his photography journey in the navy where he was sent to photography school and he was in the darkroom for roughly 4 years where he did nothing but printing ("A photographic journey"). He also became the assistant of Dorothy Lang, a well-known photographer, while he was in art school. From her, Gibson learned that the main thing he lacked what was Lang called a "point of departure." He had no objective when going out with his camera, he simply walked the streets hoping to come across something worth photographing. Gibson started to have a purpose when he went out. She also taught him that it was your relationship to the subject, not the technicalities, that made a strong photograph ("A photographic journey"). Gibson is primarily known for his work in "exploring the surreal visual nature of the subconscious" ("Ralph Gibson"). He puts an extreme level of detail into real life subjects that creates a mysterious, surrea...

Michael Kenna is a famous landscape photographer from the United Kingdom. He didn't start sharing his landscape work until he went to New York and discovered that many display their work in art galleries in the U.S. which was not a common thing at the time in the UK. From showcasing his work, he ended up becoming somewhat of a car photographer because vehicle advertising agencies saw space for their product in his black-and-white work. Kenna said, "in my work, I try to leave space for an individual viewer to enter it so there's always spaces around, it's not full ("Photographer Profiles - Michael Kenna"). He continued to leave space in his work even after advertising and stayed with his passion for minimalism. Michael Kenna is also famous for his night photography with long exposures that span from ten minutes to twelve hours. At first glance, I don't think I felt really connected to Kenna's work at all. I did enjoy looking at the "Sakura and Ful...

 Lee Friedlander started his photography career by taking photos of musicians for their album covers ("Lee Friedlander"). These covers would be square colored pictures and it was how he was able to make a living as a new photographer. He later moved on to street photography where he'd take pictures of people living their every day lives, of reflections in glass windows, and of his own shadow. Interestingly enough, while his facial features were never seen in the photos containing his shadows, these pictures were considered to be self-portraits as they show his sense of humor and light-heartedness. Personally, I think what Friedlander does with his street photography is really interesting. He goes to the city, where there are all these moving pieces, and manages to capture them in a way that makes any individual subject feel interconnected in the web of the city. We even see this in some of the photos with his shadow in the foreground. Some may say that his silhouette take...

Man Ray started out as a painter in New York in the early 1900s. After traveling to France he moved to portrait work to make ends meet where he accidentally created what he called the "Rayograph." Ray stated, "I had finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself" ("Crimes against Photography"). From there on he spent more time in the darkroom experimenting and discovering new complex compositions that "evoked space and movement" ("Crimes against Photography").  Looking through Man Ray's work, I wasn't drawn to any of his Rayographs in particular. I understand that they brought about a new era in photography, but none of his compositions really inspired me in any way. I believe this is because the concepts he mistakenly created are widely used today in what we call photograms. What he did to his sheet of exposed paper is something I have already learned how to do in class. In additi...