See/Saw

One subject a day, for one year, from two perspectives. Three-hundred and sixty-five photos, times two.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

tens...

things have been a little hectic for us lately, plus our team's in the playoffs just kicking the crap out of people. i realized i needed some time to shoot some more stuff, and we kind of just needed to regroup in terms of getting material up here. my idea was to showcase photographers that we each like, and for a couple of posts choose photographs from each one, maybe talking a little about why we like that person's work to give you all an idea of who our influences are. sounds great, right?

the only problem is that ash (the "she" of he saw/she saw) is so new to photography that she doesn't really have any influences yet.

so instead, she's picking ten of her current favorite photos and will say a little about why she likes each one. I, of all the influences, have chosen ten photographers (of the many) who first got me interested in photography. they're coming in no particular order, except that the ten i chose are pretty much the first ten photographers i took notice of. there were a few, like nobuyoshi araki and edward weston, that just don't have many quality examples online, so they didn't make the cut. i could scan some from books, but that would defeat the purpose of this exercise, which is to talk photography AND buy us some time with minimal effort. there were others, like lee friedlander, diane arbus, and gary winogrand who are all influences, but they came later on, after i had started shooting on my own and had developed a particular taste or ideal.

so, let's get started, shall we?



she saw:

ramona g.

she said:

"it's a story that tells a story."



he saw:

william eggleston













he said:

at a time when professional, artistic photography was really only appreciated in black and white, William Eggleston was one of a handful of photographers who first chose, and later preferred, to shoot in color. black & white prints are to photography what charcoal sketching is to drawing- there's a certain assumed gravitas in the presentation and people tend to look at it with their serious face. when color photography first became available to the masses, it was seen as a novelty by the true artistes who felt that it was "faddish" or even insulting to the art of photography. how could a color photograph carry the weight of a b&w shot? it's a debate for the ages, right along side digital versus film. aside from the artistic integrity involved with choosing one over the other, for myself the answer to the question of which medium is a pretty easy one to answer: if i want the look of film, i shoot film. if i want to shoot something for it's color, i shoot it in color.

in artistic circles Eggleston furthered the work of Saul Leiter, a self taught "street" photographer who shot color in new york in the fifties and sixties. their work went a long way towards legitimizing color photography for future shooters, and in Eggleston's case especially, helped to usher in the era of the "professional snapshot" work of artists like nan goldin, among others.

many of Eggleston's early photos take a page from photorealistic painters who sought to capture the life and environments around them in depicting the fronts of gas stations or drugstores or city streets. i was first drawn to eggleston almost by mistake. i was familiar with his name, and found a book of his titled "los alamos." i was, and still am, interested in the atomic age, of building the bomb and the culture that surrounded it's creation and what came next, so to find a book of photography with this title was instantly appealing. what i found inside had little to do with the atomic bomb, but was engaging none the less. from that volume, i sought out more.

in an age where the photographic image is so widespread, it's often difficult to trace a particular style back to its originator. eggleston's seemingly simplistic photographs of everyday objects and places have been knowingly or unknowingly imitated from the hotel photographs of David Byrne to contemporary street photography along the lines of Philip Lorca Di Corcia. i certainly owe some of my "eye" to eggleston's work. it reminds me to find the image in the things all around me, and to always be looking. most importantly, as a young artist he helped me to see that anything was up for grabs and that if the image was strong enough color, or lack of, didn't matter. shoot what you find interesting.



*all images copyright their respective artists or agencies*

No comments:

Post a Comment