Walker Evans

Walker Evans, born November 3rd, 1903 in St.Louis Missouri is known for his photography during the Great Depression. He photographed "modern America in the making" for over fifty years, taking photographs from the 1920's until the early 1970's. He was known for taking pictures of people on the street in local cafes, bedrooms, or at a stand on the side of the road. During the Great Depression Evans photographed the workers and architecture of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) In Southeastern America. He worked for Fortune magazine as a staff photographer for twenty years until he became a professor for photography and graphic design at Yale University.




His pictures are really clear and sharp, I find this photo very interesting just to look at. It shows a different era of our history and it is quite fascinating,



This picture was part of his collection that was shown at the Museum of Modern Art called Walker Evans: American Photographs. This is one of his FSA photographs and I love the colors and the grey tones. The people are so interesting and I think their faces really tell a story of the Great Depression.



This is a very famous image of Walker Evan's. It is so simple but yet very interesting. Its so sharp and I think its just a well done photo.

Michael Carroll Pictures

Here are some images that Michael Carroll took.



The use of black and white makes these photos great, I love this image because you would never think how just a little hand could tell such a big story.



This image really depicts how awful these orphanages were and its really powerful.

Michael Carroll

Michael Carroll is a photographer who captured the horror story of Romanian orphans after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Thousands of children were infected with HIV/AIDS and were dying every day. Carroll used his camera to document what was happening in Romania and bring it back to the US for media sources like the New York Times and the Boston Globe.  After seeing this tragedy, Carroll and many supports created the Romanian Children's Relief and it's partner, Fundatia Inocenti to help children and families in need and prevent child abandonment. Carroll's work in Romania opened the Western worlds' eyes to what was really happening in Romania at the time and helped bring them assistance. 

Romanian orphanages have come a long way since the tragedies of the 1990s but the children are still not in the level of care we would see proper for them. A lot of children are still being abandoned but overall the sanitation of the orphanages has gone up in recent years. 

Today Michael Carroll works as a freelance photographer and media consultant. His corporate clients have included Disney, Compaq, Malden Mills, Beth Israel Hospital, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, American Express and General Motors Corp. (http://www.sxu.edu/student-life/ministry/crpd/sweeney/hand_held_film_general/bio_michael_carroll.asp) He is till the President of the Romanian Children's Relief.


http://www.sxu.edu/student-life/ministry/crpd/sweeney/hand_held_film_general/bio_michael_carroll.asp
http://www.romanianorphanministries.com/the-orphans-of-romania/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans
http://www.romania-insider.com/hand-held-documentary-about-romanias-orphans-screened-in-bucharest-in-december/14613/

Edward Curtis

Edward Curtis was the most well-known photographer of native Americans. He produced many prints of Native American tribes that were all sepia-toned. his most famous work was The North American Indian (1907-1930) that had twenty volumes including poster-sized prints. The volumes were organized by tribe spanning over the regions of the Great Plains, the Great Basin, Plateau Region, Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska. He photographed over eighty tribes, giving the world the most famous depictions of Native Americans we still know today.


These photos show how Native Americans truly lived. I love the sepia tones, I think that it really makes the photograph unique.




I love the headdress on this man in the image. I think the colors and tones are great and it's just overall an amazing picture.

Once again I think we are lucky to have all these images of Native Americans that Curtis took. This just shows us so much about their lives.

Shutterspeed Priority Post-Assignment

One of the most difficult things about this project was timing. It is hard to get the perfect shot of someone in midair because you might miss it and it's hard to ever get it again. The continuous shooting setting on the camera really helped me with this assignment because it allowed me to take multiple pictures at once and see if any of them turned out right. Another difficult thing was focus. To focus the person before they get in the view of the camera is difficult and sometimes with the person in focus the rest of my picture would look really blurry which isn't the look i was going for. I think this project was really fun because i learned more about the settings on my camera and how to use them to get better pictures. I think some of my composition could have been better and I think it would be cool to photo-shop these pictures as if they're walking in air. I really want to learn how to do the photo-shop edit where you take out the stool but I will learn that eventually.


Here are my shutter speed pictures for this week,

This is my favorite photograph of the three. I made Dylan do it many times but I think this one came out so good. I love that you can see his face and how contrasting the white bar is to his clothes. I think it's really cool.

This picture is supposed to make it look like hes walking on thin air but the blurry background really irritates me. I had to lighten it in photo shop but that made the background pixilated and i don't like it. 

This photo is cool but i wish the railing wasn't in the background. 

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was born on march 14, 1929 and she died on July 26, 1971 from committing suicide. She went to the Fieldston School for ethical culture and married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, at the age of eighteen. They had two daughters, Doon and Amy before they divorced in 1969.

Diane Arbus is a photographer that is known for her square, black and white pictures of people in New York. What made her photographs unique was her subjects. You usually chose to take pictures of "freaks"; transgender, dwarf, giants, nudists, and circus performers. She had the belief that a camera was needed to expose truth and she did just that. She showed her audience a whole world of people they knew nothing about. These people are usually shunned from society and Arbus brought them to the center of attention with her photographs.


This photo is so disturbing but interesting you can't stop looking at it.

She photographed people that we normally don't feel comfortable around. The longer you look at it the more you're intrigued. I love it.

Her pictures have a sense of creepiness or weariness about them. The black and white makes them almost fake, like they are so surreal you can't stop looking at it. This photo is great composition with the matching outfits and them standing side by side it draws your eyes right away.

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis was born in Denmark on May 3, 1849. He moved to New York City in 1870 when he was 21 years old. In New York he had little to no money so he experienced what it was like to be poor and live in the slums. When he got his job with the New York Tribune he made it his mission to expose the lives of the poor to the common public using photography. He was the first person to use flash powder so he could capture the lives of poverty at night. He appeared in Subscriber's Magazine and then created a full-length version of his work called "How the Other Half Live". His work was very expository and inspiring to many people.


This picture just shows how cramped the conditions these people where living in were. A lot of people had turned a blind eye to this extreme poverty until Riis exposed them.



Again, just amazing at capturing the emotion of these people.



This just shows us how different the times were back then. Our schools are not like this anymore so it is really interesting to see what these young children experienced.

Mary Ellen Mark

Mary Ellen Mark (1940) is an American photographer that is world renowned for her exhibitions, magazine work and multiple books. She was born in Philadelphia and attended Cheltenham High School and eventually received her degree in art history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. She has traveled all over the world since then to capture human nature in it's "highest degree of humanism". She works primarily in black and white and her subjects are people around the world who exhibit a theme of either loneliness, drug abuse, prostitution, or homelessness. Her images are so famous because everyone everywhere can relate to them. These things exist all over the world, making her photographs relatable and iconic.

 




These images are just AMAZING!! These pictures are just truly expository; they shed light on cultures and people we don't normally think about. These pictures are so inspiring me, it makes you think about the people in them, what their lives are like.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer in the late 1800's. She was born in 1815 and died in 1879. she received her first camera at the age of forty-eight. She began with no knowledge of photography and within eighteen months had submitted over 80 photos to the Victoria and Albert Museum and had arrangements with the print seller Colnaghi. she took pictures of people she knew and made them into celebrities. She was completely original and innovative.


These pictures are beautiful because you want to know what the model is thinking. what was Cameron's thoughts for this photo? What was she trying to convey? I love pictures of people because i think they tell a story more than any other types of photography.



One of the reasons her images are so interesting to me is because I never could have imagined this man. I don't know him, yet there he is, developing a story line that is open to my imagination.


Once again, just beautiful and original.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/camr/hd_camr.htm
pancreature.wordpress.com 

Up-Close Photos Post-Assignment

Here are my close-up Imogen Cunningham photos. 

I like this picture because of it's simplicity. I know that this is a very common picture, (up-close black and white rose) but it was so fun to take. You never truly realize that something like a flower can have so much beauty until you get that close. 

This picture is cool because the flower is not in the center, it draws so much attention to itself even though there are other blurry flowers in the background. Somehow I think that the other blurred out flowers make this picture better, if it was just that flower by itself, i think it would be boring. This gives something for your eye to be attracted to.

The only reason I really like this photo is because of the flags in the background. I know what color the flag is in real life so it makes me wonder what color the flower is. Putting in an element we are familiar with leaves a sense of mystery to the things we don't know. It's not extremely up close but I still think it's interesting. 

        This project was very different than our other projects because there were some key elements in taking these photographs.  Our cameras had to be on aperture priority to get the best image. I enjoyed photographing the flowers the most because usually you see flowers in a whole bunch but when you isolate one and make that the complete focus i think it makes you realize how beautiful they are. This assignment helped me learn more about composition, focus, and subject. The only part i didn't like about he project was that it was difficult to get the perfect angle on some of the flowers, one part would be blurry and the other in focus. After a lot of pictures though, that problem became better.