Author: seeingadmin

A photographer that I admire is Jun Song, a Korean skateboarder and Instagram personality. His photos have a similar air of emptiness that I am trying to achieve in my photos, and his stark, clean landscapes have a certain futuristic appeal. Although he deleted most of his work from his Instagram page, I was able to find a couple photos, though they don’t do his body of work justice.

As you can tell, Song has a knack for finding clean, almost sterile landscapes with great lines and shapes, something I aspire to be able to do.

As for my photographs, I wanted to try to take photos of urban environments that feel especially desolate and futuristic, yet nostalgic of the era of the early 2000s, and the mentality of an “urban hell”. It’s hard to describe the feeling I want my photos to evoke, but I would like them to be something lonely and nostalgic, like a walk through an old vacant mall, or looking at an overly-sci-fi’d commercial from the early 2000s.

In this critique, I think my photos formed a contrast between stark, foreboding concrete structures, mixed with splashes of color from other landscapes. I also tried to further enhance the “emptiness” aspect of my photos, working on finding large spaces with no people in them.

My inspiration was Bill Owens, particularly his “Hayward” collection. He is a suburban photographer who looks at a combination of residential and commercial scenes. In this project, I looked to investigate our built suburban environment and how it deals with/changes nature. My photos range from more urban to more natural, but most look to strike the suburban balance of our artificial constructions and the natural.

Inspiration: Gerhard Stromberg

Stromberg’s photography can be characterized by deadpan shots of natural landscapes. His work appeals to me because of the lack of a definite subject. The absence thereof is empowering as it allows audience members to critically engage with the backgrounds and create their own stories.

On that point, in search of society’s “spectacles,” we oftentimes overlook finer details. My collection “Blind Spots” was an attempt to bring these details to the foreground. Throughout the course of this assignment, I experimented with negative space – I put the focus on my subjects (ranging from spiders to airplanes) on hold, and instead, captured the interactions of the different elements around it (such as lighting and setting).

Artist Who Inspired My Work: Ian Plant.

I appreciate Plant’s photography because of the sublime aesthetic beauty of his images and his willingness to bring unique perspective to his dynamic subjects. I also find his use of color exceedingly effective.

While my images are varied, they all attempt to appreciate the unique beauty in both natural and built environments from novel perspectives. The focus of my body of work was to explore light and color to produce vibrant images on diverse scales. My photography ranges from the very small (water droplets) to the relatively large (sunsets). The images play with the interaction between humanity and nature by showcasing the similar aesthetic present in both worlds.

Digital Uploads:

Prints:

Artist: Jim Zuckerman
Jim Zuckerman is a photographer who has taken natural and cultural images from around the world — many of which utilize depth of field. Depth of field is when the camera focuses on the area between the nearest and furthest objects. I was inspired by how he flawlessly integrated this technique into his photographs and decided to try and experiment with it. For my project, I took images while playing pool. I figured this would be the perfect setting to test out DoF, since I could capture various angles and the billiards would add a much-needed splash of color. I also included a few other photos that utilized DoF, but didn’t follow the theme of pool tables.

Partly inspired by Miles Coolidge’s Safetyville
For this project I focused on a suburban area in Ohio. In many of the photos I tried to depict the scenes as unusual or I focused on something that stood out from the dullness around it. I wanted to create a different view of this monotonous landscape, a more sharp, focused view that one wouldn’t notice when walking around. I played with framing to center my intended focus and used the drab colors to keep the pictures looking less cluttered. My work was partly inspired by Miles Coolidge’s Safetyville in its focus on a suburban landscape and depiction of the ordinary but with some sort of other message or perspective.

Below are the images I’ve chosen for my 2nd critique, I wasn’t certian if our portfolios were supposed to be composed of 10 or 15 photographs, so here are 15 (+ a bonus lingo).

Artist who inspired me: Frank Gohlke

Artist Statement:

In my work, I am focusing on two elements that often overlap: light and reflection.  Capturing light can be tricky, so I am experimenting with the best way to make a photograph with natural lighting that can compare with that which made the original scene interesting.  As for reflections, they come in many different forms, from mirrors and puddles to repeating forms and symmetry.  I am trying to take photographs that show these reflections in a way that makes them stand out in differently than they do when you pass by them on the street or walking down a hall.  To do these things, I work closely with the framing of my photographs, making sure that every piece of information in the photograph is completely necessary and adjusting my frame even the slightest bit as necessary.  This body of work is the current culmination of my efforts to take these types of photographs but is ever growing and evolving.

The intent of this assignment was to take two locations—the I-280 highway and the “flintstone’s house”—that I drove past every day and re-evaluate them from a different angle.