I need a new resume.

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29662289@N08/4645520600/

Vivian Maier

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-06-09T19%3A40%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=50

http://www.vivianmaier.com/

Apparently, no one knew that this woman was an amazing photojournalist until her photographs were sold at an antiques auction a few years ago. At that point, she was on her deathbed, so the man who found/fell in love with her medium format photographs (most of which she took using B&W film in a rollei camera) was never able to tell her how amazing he thought her photos. Her works are currently showcased on a blog, website, and a soon to be published book. Craziness.

This is one of my favorites:

Personal Review, Graphic Design

Above are some of my recent designs. Elements I try to include in my pieces:

-simple graphics

-minimalism

-lots of negative space

-bold colors

-vintage backgrounds

-sans serif fonts (gill sans and champagne & limousines in particular)

-smooth, clean lines

-silhouettes

-halftone patterns

-sun bursts

-paint splatters

-minimal text

-grunge

Artist Review #17: Ishimoto Yasuhiro

Ishimoto Yasuhiro's most famous work was completed from 1953 to 1954 and documents the Imperial Villa of Katsura, a Japanese town that was established during the 17th century in the Imperial era. The structures that comprise the village incorporate many elements to be found later in Modernist designs, yet also reference ongoings of the 17th century.

Yasuhiro was trained in a manner that referenced the Bauhaus, and he learned to pay attention to shapes, shadows, and angles when looking at his subjects. When he turned his lens to Katsura, he was left with images that resembled "the grid-like composition of a Mondrian painting." His clean aesthetic and lack of excess in his works align with the aims of both Modernism and the traditional Japanese architecture style.

His compositions are clean, his tones are rich, and his focus is crisp. Together, these elements allow Yasuhiro's works to be visually stunning and appealing to me as both a lover of architecture and as a photographer.

Link:

http://www.artshound.com/event/detail/440734453/Katsura_Picturing_Modernism_in_Japanese_Architecture_Photographs_by_Ishimoto_Yasuhiro_

Artist Review #16: Jason Mullins

I found Jason Mullin's work while stumbling for photographs; the first images of his that I saw were these and I was instantly captivated. The water and sky in each of these appears like smooth, unscathed glass, when in reality, it may have been a windy, turbulent day. I looked up the techniques associated with milky-looking water (I knew it had something to do with a slow shutter speed and high aperture, but I wasn't sure how one went about guessing at such long exposures), and came across numerous blog postings. The second link included (the link that doesn't lead to Mullins' page), has info concerning the lens filter that Mullins likely used. Apparently I need to invest in a cheap-- but not plastic-- neutral density filter. The darker, the better, because the longer the shutter speed will be. A functional (as opposed to deformed) tripod would also be helpful for such shots (thank you, darling brother). Supposedly the milky skies and waters were really popular a few years ago, but have since gone slightly out of style. I feel like with the right subject, the kitschiness could be avoided; I think Mullins does a good job of avoiding the inspirational poster-y look in his works.

Links: http://www.jasonamullins.com/

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/neutral-density-filters

Artist Review #15: Andrea Gallo

In attempt to accumulate the amount of credit hours necessary for graduation, I opted to do a Public Relations and Marketing internship with the UR International Theatre Program. Although the internship was decidedly less design-oriented than I had anticipated (in fact, it's mostly just press releases and flyer distribution), there are some aspects of the course that lend themselves to Illustrator and Photoshop.

In lieu of a final paper, Nigel, the Artistic Director, assigned a final project incorporating all the skills we learned over the course of the semester. From press releases to radio spots to poster designs, we've been preparing for this all semester.

My first approach to the design was as follows:

Although I spent numerous hours piecing the components of this design together, they still felt disconnected and the work seemed overly busy. I then decided to look at what other people had been creating. While looking through google images for designs, I found myself drawn to minimalist posters. Although minimalism is generally associated with the 60s and 70s, it's recently made a comeback. Here are some architectural posters I found particularly captivating:

I love how the designs are clean, elegant, bold, and crisp. Although the designs are simply white text and designs on black backgrounds, they manage to incorporate all that is essential to the buildings they exemplify. When I blended the silhouettes of my components with simple colors, I would up with this:

Although I would have preferred to use smaller, less noticeable text, I feel as though a theatre poster necessitates big, bold show times and production titles. The fonts were particularly hard to get for the design; I wanted a serif font that was militaristic, eroded, slightly antiquated, and readable from a distance. I finally settled upon an edited version of American Typewriter, found on dafont.com. (I would be lost without this site). All in all, I liked the inspiration that Gallo's work provided. The simplicity, I think, makes for a more stunning result; my first attempt seemed far too cluttered and the second is more consistent with my aesthetic.

Links: Dafont.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/roosterization/5390139965/in/set-72157626325929842/

Constructing Negative Space: Revised Artist Statement

As a person easily fascinated by small details, I find the intricacy of simple objects and buildings to be something deserving of attention. While my eventual goal is to create my own architectural forms, I found it necessary to first understand the guiding principles inherent to structural design. I set out to photograph architecture in order to better understand it; I wanted to truly learn the principles instead of just reading about them in a textbook.

Photography is a method of observation but also of interaction. I have a profound connection with each of the buildings I capture. I touch them, I walk around them, and if possible, I climb to their peaks. Taking a picture of them only aids in my understanding of their symmetry, functionality, and spatiality.

When photographing architecture, I often use oblique angles as a way of abstracting my subjects. This forces viewers to look at complex structures as a collection of simple elements. Just as modern architecture removes all excessive ornamentation, my photographs strip buildings down to their essential components. Structures are reduced to forms, textures, tones, highlights, shadows, and geometric relationships and overcast skies become basic shapes. To take away everything unnecessary is to glorify what remains. The minimalism and purity often found in the constructed world is overwhelmingly beautiful to me and I seek to understand and convey this through my photography.

Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 3

A quote I particularly like:

"Hervé approached his subjects, specifically the buildings he was commissioned to document, with a particular focus on conveying a sense of space, texture and structure. Through a strong contrast of light and shadow, Hervé defined the dialogue between substance and form as well as placing emphasis on building details."

(From http://historyofourworld.wordpress.com/2010/10/22/building-images-lucien-herve/)


I haven't really discussed why my work aligns with the aims of new vision photography, but I would like to do so now. Straight photography, or documentary style photography, was popular up until the mid-1930s. At this point, men like Maholy Nagy and other teachers/followers of the Bauhaus school started to explore the potentials of the medium. No longer was photography just a means of documenting reality, but a way of creating it, or forcing people to take notice of particular relationships that may have otherwise gone overlooked.

My work stands apart from documentary style photography, and is pretty in line with the aims of new vision photography. I often use oblique angles (either extreme ups or intense downs) as a way of disorienting my viewers. Just as modern architecture removes all excess from its structures, my photographs strip down buildings to their barest elements; all that is left are textures, tones, and geometric relationships.

The importance of doing such a thing is to foster a love of the simple. To take away everything unnecessary is to glorify everything that remains and is absolutely essential to the essence of a thing. When I photograph the most necessary details of a structure, I am showing what is most crucial to its existence. I think the most beautiful things are the most basic; I like to photograph what is pure, essential, and simple.

Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 2

Above is the image resulting from my re-shoot from last week. A lot of the images I initially wanted to include had cloudy or blue skies. The latter was easy to fix in photoshop; (I just changed the photo filter used when I converted the image to black and white), but the former was all but impossible and would have yielded an overly edited photograph. To fix this issue, I re-shot 3 of the 8 photographs I chose to include in my show over the course of this semester. Without the whited-out sky, I felt as though a lot of my images were architectural landscapes and not pure geometry (more documentary-styled than new vision photographs). I wanted the shapes in my images as abstract and possible and the clouds detracted from the shape that a white sky creates.

The angles I chose to shoot tend to be taken while looking upwards towards the sky. Although this was unintentional and I had in fact just been looking for interesting geometric relationships, the sky becomes part of what my work is about. The negative space of the sky becomes its own shape, no more or less important than the shapes found within the structures in my photographs. By shooting at inverted angles (ones not common to architectural or home magazines), I'm forcing viewers to look at buildings as a collection of simple elements. The sky is just another unornamented form. Simple shapes eventually give way to complex structures.

Constructing Negative Space: Free-Write 1

Whenever I'm directly asked a question, I feel caught off guard. I begin to run through the long list of things that I'd been thinking of, from carpet patterns to a classmate's expression to whatever existential crisis had been plaguing me that week. After a good 30 seconds of consideration, I still find myself unsure of which thought could be translated into the appropriate verbal response for the question at hand. At times, I even forget the question I'd been asked in the first place.

Living in my own head doesn't help me create a cohesive artist talk, it seems. So, I've decided to use this blog as a place to brainstorm for my upcoming show. A stream of consciousness free write, but directed towards my architectural photographs.

Currently, here are the photographs I'm going to include in my thesis show:

(For the record, I hope to re-shoot the second to bottom some time this week, so long as the weather cooperates and delivers me an overcast day without precipitation.)

The first thing that jumps out at me when I look at this series is the white space. I remember one art class when my professor showed me a teddy bear and told me not to draw the bear, but to draw the space around it. It's easy to draw what we know, what we expect; if asked to draw a teddy bear, most people would revert to symbol drawing. But, when I was told to focus on a component that I had once not even considered, I began to see the bear differently.

The same is true with these images. When first presented with them, I see white space contrasted with blacks and greys. These white spaces attract me and force me to recognize patterns composed of clouded skies, or more eloquently put, of the absence of constructed space.

The negative space is especially evident because I use distorted angles, the likes of which were trademarks of New Vision photography (Maholy Nagy, Lucien Herve). In abstracting the buildings I choose to photograph, I force the viewer to look at my images as a collection of lines, shapes, forms, textures, tones, highlights, shadows, and geometric relationships. I photograph the way I see the world; often at weird angles, completely apart from preconceived notions, and always new and exciting. At this point, I'm still unsure if the focus is giving architecture a new lens or whether I'm really all gung ho about negative space. What would it mean to photograph the absence of something? (I should look this up tomorrow, maybe not at 3am).

Also, at this point I want to talk about the potentials of a video installation in my show. I have yet to test out my works with projectors (though I have looked into it online and also done tests with photoshop ), but I'm pretty sure my idea of overlapping two images at a time will work. When viewing the projected piece, neither of the two photographs being displayed will be fully apparent; the overlapping images will abstract the image even further, and thereby make the specific details of the buildings even more pronounced. I guess the images on the walls will be like the first step in this show and the video the second; the projection will display the highest point at which architecture can be abstracted while still making the details of the buildings apparent.