Photography Through My Own Lens

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...