Saturday, February 28, 2009

review


1. Nobody critiqued my work this week.
2. My motivational event of the week was that we got thursday to work, and I PRODUCED!!!!
3. What I want to achieve next week in studio is to get all my images ready for Amy Stein and printed, or at least all of my good ones printed.
4. In this week's studio I got tons of film shot! 11 rolls to be precise. It was an awesome workday.
5. A profound thought of mine came from a punk rock band from Chicago that i've loved for a long time, The Lawrence Arms's song "Overheated" and the quote is: "Through my smokey eyes, a blurred hotel room stood." I plan on staging this quote.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Laura Letinsky






What I enjoy about Laura Letinksy's work is that she references dutch still life paintings from the seventeenth century. She presents the nature of human relationships to the thoughts of domestic lives. She says that she is not trying to reference any symbols with the choices of the food she selects, but she wants to use metaphorical and domestic references to create a narrative within the frame presented to the viewer. She wants us to try and understand why she photographed these areas at the specific time that she did, and what is the meaning of set point in time? She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and her MFA from Yale in 1991. She is also currently a professor and chair for the University of Chicago's Visual Arts Department.

Gallery: http://www.josephbellows.com/artists/laura-letinsky
Interview: http://mouthtomouthmag.com/letinsky.html

Friday, February 20, 2009

1. Nobody really critiqued my work this week. Heide was very brief with me and said that my work has gotten better and that I need to keep on doing what I am doing, because I am on a roll.

2. The most motivational thing of the week is when I started to listen to The Lawrence Arms. They have been providing me with a creative outlook that I never experienced when listening to their music before.

3. What I want to achieve in studio next week is, well, we're critiquing Alma and Lauren's work, and I want to start shooting more indoor narratives as well.

4. What I achieved in studio this week is that I broke out from my barrier or completely formal and centerweighted work. I said fuck it to f/22 and having a strong central element in my work. Houston, I've broken out of the comfort zone.

5. My profound thought goes with my motivational moment. The Lawrence Arms have been helping me think of many different ways to shoot and do art. I'd bet they'd be happy to hear that as well.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Isaac Layman






Isaac Layman is a seattle based artist who received his BFA from the University of Washington. His work look completely real, but are actually digital composites of many different shots. He uses a 4x5 and adds a digital back to the camera. He then slowly scans the image and in turn "downloads" the photograph to his computer. Much of his work has to deal with the ideas of "real" and its battle "digital". They are hyperreal scene of the mundane taken place in the confines of his home.

website: www.isaaclayman.com/
Interview: http://www.matthewlangley.com/blog/2007/03/few-questions-isaac-layman.html
Gallery: http://www.lawrimoreproject.com/lp/Artists/Pages/Isaac_Layman.html

Friday, February 13, 2009

* What was the most profound thought in relation to your practice this week?

My work was critiqued this week, by Paul Shambroom. His impressions of my work were mixed. He liked that I could compose a very nice formal composition and that the drive was there, but he couldn't find meaning within the images that I presented to him. They all, for the most part, were striking photographs, but my idea and theory were lost in the mix. I agree, but it was because the images that i showed him were a bit old (well, about a week and a half old). He didn't like how the sides fell out of focus, but he understood why they did. He felt that I really needed to dig deeper and compose more of a narrative.

The most creative moment of the week came from me wondering through richmond. I stumbled upon a very industrial and natural area. It was under the leigh st. viaduct near mcv.

I want to achieve what i've been setting out to do this whole time. I want people to understand my photographs without me telling them what they're all about.

What I accomplished this week in studio is that I really need to not make my photographs so center weighted, I need to tease the edges and quit being so obvious with all of my work.

My profound thought was pretty much what I just said.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Edward Burtynsky Interview

an interview with Edward Burtynsky
There’s a certain resonance in the fact that photographer Edward Burtynsky is seated on the stairwell of a fashionable Harajuku building for this interview. It looks out on a neighborhood that is one of Japan’s—and the world’s—consumer hot spots, a catwalk filled with people in dressed the latest trends and flashing the newest gadgets. Burtynsky’s eyes, grayish and blue, don’t really seem to take it in. He doesn’t do fashion. But he does know a few things about the cost of what he sees.

One of Canada’s leading artists, Burtynsky has traveled to places from where most of our possessions originate, and where they ultimately end up. Over the span of two decades he’s headed into the world’s largest quarries and pits, to immense factories where the assembly lines stretch to the horizon and to vast recycling yards where laborers work with tools unchanged since the Iron Age.

Working with a large-format camera, he’s brought back images that are mesmerizingly beautiful, even as they show the ravages of industrialization on a scale previously unknown. His photos have won him international awards and turned him into the subject of a 2006 documentary, “Edward Burtynsky: Manufactured Landscapes.” Made by fellow Canadian Jennifer Baichwal, the film has been hailed by Al Gore as “extraordinary, haunting, beautiful, insightful and thought-provoking.”

Yet the photographer is no “card-carrying environmentalist”—to use his own phrase. And his words, much like his photographs, are less about shock and awe than they are about measured reflection.
“We are like the smoker who knows cigarettes are bad, but finds it hard to imagine life without them.

“We are, in a global scale, addicted to a certain standard of living, to certain foods and forms of transportation,” says Burtynsky, who flew 6,479 air miles from Toronto to Tokyo in advance of the film’s July 12 opening at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Image Forum Theatre.

“When I get on a jet and fly somewhere, I understand that I am part of the problem. But at the same time I find some relief in the fact that I am trying to use my work to address it.”




Industry is a lifelong theme for Burtynsky: His father was a factory worker and he put in time at a General Motors plant himself before becoming a landscape photographer. In the beginning, his work idyllicized nature, until industry called him back.
“I was driving and came across a coal-mining area in Pennsylvania, a landscape that had been totally transformed miles upon miles,” he explains. “The colors were very unreal, the whole place was very unreal and a light went off in my head. This landscape is more true to the time that I live in,” he says, than to his original vision.

In “Manufactured Landscapes,” Baichwal’s camera follows Burtynsky through China as he records the country’s breakneck rush to become “the factory to the world.” In it we see that Burtynsky is a perfectionist: At a factory in Zhangzhou he stands on a crane and orchestrates where the workers stand in his shot; at a town being dismantled near the Three Gorges Dam he pays a man with a donkey to retrace his steps through the ruin; and at a recycling town in Guangdong province he directs children to play on a hill of smashed computer components.
There’s a monumental feel to his images. Yet what is more remarkable is how Burtynsky is able to move behind the scenes to get them.

“Almost every place I do is on the other side of barbed wire fences,” he says, and pretty ugly to boot. “So I had to somehow be able to negotiate into those spaces. The whole premise right from the early ’80s was, ‘How do I begin to negotiate into these spaces? How do I position this body of work?’ “I realized I had to stay out of the environmental window. How I describe it to these guys who run these companies is that I am building a compendium of the largest industries on the planet. And I am here because you own the largest quarry that I can find, you own the biggest iron-making factory in the world and I would like this to be part of the body of work. At the end of the day every image I make is the largest example of that industry and you’re at the head.”

Viewers often see his work as part of the environmental movement, Burtynsky says, but he maintains that’s not his agenda.

“The way I get in is I say, ‘Look, I am showing it in a way that allows people to look at it and interpret.’ If it was clearly about indictment and about trying to slam what these people are doing, then it would quickly end my career. If they see that type of position they won’t let you anywhere near, because of course there would be no upside for them.
“What possibly would they get in return for their private business? Nothing if I’m a Greenpeace card carrier. But as an artist, they are curious about how I would see it, what I would see in it, because they can’t see it.”

That comes through poignantly in a central scene in “Manufactured Landscapes,” where Burtynsky is negotiating past the manager into a steel smeltery that could pass for Mordor.
“Look, this place is kind of a dirty dump,” his interpreter says, “but by his photos he’ll make it beautiful.”
Looking through Burtynsky’s photos the manager relents. There’s no denying their beauty—he has no choice but to let them in.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Friederike von Rauch










Friederike von Rauch is a German photographer that was born in Berlin in 1967. She studied at the Berlin University of Art from 1992-1998 and before that she was a Silversmith apprentice from 1987-1990. Her minimalist eye and aesthetic help reveal her home of Berlin, and many surroundings that she has grown up with to the viewer. The very cool toned nature of these photographs reveal the starkness and natural/built beauty and purity of the society and of its architecture.

Website: www.vonrauch.com
Gellery: http://www.kunstagenten.de/Neue_Dateien/01_artist/von_rauch/von_rauch_workoverview.html
Interview: ?

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Yeah, my work got critiqued this week. It wasn't what i wanted it to be, but it did. My presentation was wrong, due to no matte cutter (so they were presented as diptychs), the scans of the images were messed up, so the sides had fall off, and i over sharpened. Also, another thing that didn't help was that I started working on something a bit different and didn't get the film back until thursday morning, so i couldn't show anything new. So, basically the critique was for images that were irrelevant. (This wasn't my best critique.)

The critique was the most motivational thing of the week, before and after. I worked really hard for this critique on thursday, and i was angry from the critique. So, I am really going to push my work and aesthetic and theory for my new work.

What i want to achieve this week in studio is that I want to breakthrough my utter lack of theory, and just figure out what it is i'm actually trying to do and accomplish in my work.

What i achieved in this week's studio, is a bunch of printing and preparing for my critique, but obviously to no avail.

My most profound thought of the week was...I'm not really sure. I just need to get my shit together and make art.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Andreas Gursky Interview

Veit Görner : You recently mentioned that you have to defend yourself against being described as a landscape or architectural photographer. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that many of your early photos really do show the countryside of your homeland and, later, alpine landscapes. And even in more recent pictures such as “Yogyakarta”, “Grand Hyatt Park” or “Rhein”. nature and the landscape don't seem to have lost their appeal for you. However, the sometimes overwhelming fascination that these pictures of natural beauty exercise on the viewer can make us forget all too easily that human beings or other traces of civilization are also in the picture. But there are two aspects of your pictures that I find even more interesting than this little contrast. Firstly, that you've added a global view of things to your local perspective, which I believe quite pragmatically is a result of the trips you take in connection with your artistic activities. What I find more interesting, however, is that your more recent works have become more strictly formal. What could be thought of as an arbitrary situation is dominated by a structure, such as in “Rhein”, the pictures of Portman architecture, or the almost stage-managed pictures of shoes, “Prada I” and “II” or “o.T.V.”. How did this shift in emphasis come about? Is it just a way of avoiding being confused with other artists, or is it the result of a new fascination with the idea of order or the serially ornamental?

Andreas Gursky : Yes, my pictures really are becoming increasingly formal and abstract. A visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture. Apart from the constantly recurring elements I have already mentioned, another aspect occurs to me which explains the way my pictures function. You never notice arbitrary details in my work. On a formal level, countless interrelated micro and macrostructures are woven together, determined by an overall organizational principle. A closed microcosm which, thanks to my distanced attitude towards my subject, allows the viewer to recognize the hinges that hold the system together. Of course, there are adequate reasons to justify such a formal, schematic representation of reality.
If you talk about my interest in nature, I have to explain my extended notion of nature. I am perhaps more interested in the nature of things in general - again and again, the term "aggregate state" comes to mind when I describe the existential state of things.


Being confused with other photographers has ceased to be an issue for me since l stopped working thematically. After my degree our work did occasionally overlap within the Becher circle, which sometimes caused headaches. The more success we had, however, the more we learnt to deal with such things more calmly - thank God. But it would be a sorry state of affairs if my artistic development were to depend on the results of my colleagues' work. The shift in emphasis you mention could also be seen as a logical progression from the seemingly naive landscapes of the Eighties to today's drier and more abstract pictures. I believe that there's also a certain form of abstraction in my early landscapes: for example, I often show human figures from behind and thus the landscape is observed «through» a second lens. I don't name the activities of the human figures specifically and hence do not question what they do in general. The camera's enormous distance from these figures means that they become de-individualized. So I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment. This is also true of Rhein. I wasn't interested in an unusual, possibly picturesque view of the Rhine, but in the most contemporary possible view of it. Paradoxically, this view of the Rhine cannot be obtained in situ, a fictitious construction was required to provide an accurate image of a modern river. The same thing happened when I visited over 70 world-famous industrial companies. Most of them had a socio-romantic air I hadn't expected. I was looking for visual proof of what I thought would be antiseptic industrial zones. If these companies had been systematically documented one would have had the feeling one was back in the days of the Industrial Revolution. After this experience I realized that photography is no longer credible, and therefore found it that much easier to legitimize digital picture processing.

Andreas Fragel Photography










This is the photography of Andreas Fragel. Now, I really can't find that much information on him, but what I've gathered is that his work has to do with a lot of backstory. He, in some, shoots a village that had to be abandoned so that a strip mine could be built. The toxicity of the mining and the dangers of the repercussions of it, forced the people out of their homes. He seems to photograph either the desolate or the new urban/suburban expanses of society. It is very intriguing work, but his website is in a different language, so I am uncertain of a few aspects of his work, life, education, and experiences. He is also a filmmaker, musician, and commercial artist. He is a minimalist musician as well.

His website states this about him:

"Andreas is also active in film and music production, does video clips.
He worked for Commercial (KW 43 ), Music DVD`s (Kraftwerk) and Documentary (David Wittenberg ).
He was more or less substantially involved at production which get the following awards:
red dot - Best of the Best 2003, The International Andy Awards - Destinction Winner 2003,
Pardo d´honneur Filmfestspiele Locarno 1996, WDR Preis Videonale 7 Bonn 1996, Grimme Preis Marl 1998.
His music for art videos include "Kuss" and "Ein Tisch, zwei Teller" from Vladimir Frelih.
The video clip for his own track "Komikon" entered the Oberhausen Video Award Film Festival.
He released several EPs on his own vinyl label MOS, and contributed tracks to Trapez, Traum and to "Miss Kitten´s Radio Caroline".
For a short time he has a camera."

website: http://www.andreas-fragel.de/
I didn't find gallery representation.
or interview

regardless I enjoy his personal aesthetic choices in his photographs.