What Does Photography Mean to Me?

Ana Mendieta, was a Cuban-American, woman of many talents from being a: artist, painter,  sculptor, and video artist. She was most famously known for her "earth-body" artwork. She played an important role in society, as she was a feminist and expressed female identity through,  photography, film, and sculpting and express important things like violence and sexuality. I love the image above. It's interesting to look at because it seems as if the grass is growing from the body. I also think about how then people say things can grow off dead bodies but I am not sure if that is true but it does represent that. This image is telling me that whether dead or alive all things grow. I am also curious to know if she placed the model on already grown flowers or if she picked them and placed them in between her body. She used this image to represent art being taken back into nature. Overall, I think this image is a great depiction of the cycle of life.  Coming from Cuba and...

Robert Frank was a Swiss documentary photographer. His work was often created when it was night time, creating a grainy film, and blur in his images. He photographed significant and relevant of events in history that he thought was important to be shown. It is stated that his "  pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption (The New York Times). People assumed that his photography was stripping away what people was known to be in America, which was perfection. They viewed his work as trying to criticize America but in reality he was trying to honor and show what was try to America from his perspective.  Looking at his work, I would think that he was an American. I get a sense of patriotism looking at his work. Specifically ...

Mark Power is a British Photographer was studied life-drawings and painting who went into photography and is now the most respected documentary photographer. In an interview, he states, " a committed photographer exploring a theme over several months or years is a very different proposition from someone who simply takes pictures for Instagram. Furthermore, I’ve always thought that ‘taking photographs’ is the easy part; making sense of what you’ve collected, and doing something meaningful with all of that material, is far more difficult" (Drakes) and I completely agree. Anyone can take a photo but what makes a photo art is when there is a meaning that can be determined from it and can create multiple different opinions from every peer of eyes that sees it.  I love this image. It represents choice, messiness, relaxation and so much more. The photograph was taken when the pandemic started as the photographer's daughter and son came home from university. His room (son) is sup...

  "The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." If the statement is saying that before a photo is taken, the emotion that is happening before it will not always be replicated with the same emotion before the picture was taken, I would have to say I agree. Any emotion or feeling that is seen before a moment is capture will not look the same to the person that has taken the photograph to someone looking at the photograph. The interpretation of a photo can easily be changed in anyones eyes and tell them something different about what is happening in the photo. Everything someone says about a photograph they are looking at automatically becomes an opinion. A photo reprints pieces of reality, and people are really just commenting on what they see based on the reality they are livi...

  “Because  each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus ...  photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each  of  these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning .”  -  Susan Sontag , On Photography by Susan Sontag , ISBN: 0385267061 , Page: 10 Photography has the power to express so many different types of emotions. So many things can be communicated through images and send different messages to each person that looks at photos. The fact that photographs can be edited like the one above also goes to show the impact on editing a photo can have. A basic picture of president Obama was turned into a beacon of hope. So much can w...

" Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them" pg 2 Photos can last a long time or can be very short lived. I never really thought about how much photographs go through so much within time. The fact the photographs can age faster than humans and easily die out as in disappear or get lost just like humans is crazy. So many things can happen with photos that are printed, but as society has advanced photos are never really lost now or just old and fragile but tucked somewhere in a file. As stated in ...

  Looking back at the Still Life assignment sheet, Chema Madoz image was the one that stood out to me. I really love this picture because I would of never though of putting plates in between the sewage floor. It's like such a creative way of maying a still life picture and is very unique to me. Madoz is known for his surrealist and poetic photographs. Looking over some of his images they look really architectural and has a lot of structure to it. In some of the images I see, instead of taking pictures with people it is mainly of objects. But these look like two objects that were created together. I am curious on how that is possible and yet he could of made the image in the most simplest way. 

  This image right here I really love and I'm actually curious on how it was made. It looks very 3D as if some of his face is popping out of the screen. As I was doing my research I realized that he has so many different types of photography styles such as: symmetry, cropping, use of negative space, violation of rule of thirds, the use of corners, and etc. So cut outs I can say is my favorite of all his works.  The fact that he didn't limit his work to one type of style and had so many options to work with, I like. Normally artist stick to one style and there is nothing wring with that but sometimes we want to see something new that they can give us.  Looking through his "environmental portraiture" he really captures the essence of the person and the work that they do. Also, looking at the other portraits he has done, he really makes them look superior and I like that because its there image and there time to shine. 

               Ralph Gibson is an American photographer that is known for his photographic books and working in black-and-white images. As I read up on him I am seeing people refer to his images as having "erotic subject matter"and "mysterious" but I don't see it. In his images I don't see anything compared to Micheal Keena. Keena really displayed that mysterious look in his photographs by it looking sharp and coming in from all angels.  His main focus in his work is to communicate "contextualization" and "surreal juxtaposition." I actually think surrealism is kind of cool. I specially like it in drawings and painting but I question how people are able to do in photographs. I don't like surrealism as much in photographs as in drawings but it still looks somewhat cool to see what people are able to accomplish with people or objects they use. 

 Micheal Keena is best known for working in black and white photography. He is very famous for his unusual photographs of landscapes and actually has a lot of work in museums. Keena also is known for taking his photographs at dawn or night, using more then 10 hours of exposure to get his photographs how he wants it to look. He even has a significant amount of books written about him and his work because of his photographs interaction with nature.  Surprisingly I really love his work. It all looks so sharp with a lot of symmetry, lines, and much more. Most of his images I am really curious how he was able to take it because of the different angles and heights of the subject of the photo. He believed that photographing in black and white would make his images mysterious and I completely agree, it gives off the vibes of something smooth yet scary to come.  I noticed that Keena doesn't photograph people and that is interesting. his main goal is to create calm, sooth...

       Man Ray, was man with many talents: photography, painting, film-making, and maybe more. It was said that he played a significant role in the evaluation of photography in an art form. Like Lee Friedlander, man Ray specifically works in black and white photographs.      Surprisingly, Ray has worked in photogram. To me photogram isn't hard but can be very interesting with the objects and pieces that can be used to make the photo. Because I have worked on a photo like this I kind of feel more closer to the photography because we have done similar work. Looking at the image below, it looks like he used his hand, an ash tray,  cigarettes, and maybe two eggs. That is just my guest but knowing that anything can be made into a photogram really makes me like this.      As previously mentioned in another  blog, I stated that I did not like the black and white work Friedlander photographed but looking at ray's work, specif...

        Lee Friedlander is an American photographer who photographs mostly store-front reflections, posters, street signs and so much more. He chose to produce photographs in black and white style. As I am looking through the photos he has taken, you can see that his reflection is in some of them. I feel as if to bring more significance to what he is taking a picture of. I personally don't hate the images he has taken over the years but I find some of them boring. Some of them are dimensional but others are really simple and bland. Because the images are black and white, sometimes color tells a story but in some instances of his photographs it looks like there te lling a story but I don't know specifically what.       Based on some research I have done, black and white suggests distancing the subject matter from reality. It is stated that "removing color from a picture helps the...

     Photography has so much meaning and looks so much differently to every single person. A million people can look at one image and every single one of them will tell the photographer something different about how they interpret the photo and what it might mean to them. Photography just like drawings and painting are subjective to the person who is looking at it. Everyone internalizes photography differently, seeing things within a photo the photographer probably hadn't seen. it goes to so how unique everyone eye is and the power we as people all hold in internalizing images.      What does photography mean to mean? I'm not quite sure. I see a lot of things as beautiful such as the sky, nightfall, a piece of paper tapes to a lamppost and I don't take pictures of it. I see a lot of beauty, pain, and hurt in the world and with one snap of a finger I would able to snap the image but I don't. I guess that mean...