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. 

Eadweard Muybridge (Biography and Pre-Assignment)

Eadwear Muybridge was an English photographer who took pictures of moving objects, animals, and people. His photographs were also somewhat scientific because he proved theories about motion through series of pictures. In 1872 he was hired by Lelan Stanford to prove that at some point in a horse's gallop, all four feet were off the ground. His images were revolutionary because the captured a clearer aspect of motion. Muybridge also invented the Zoopraxiscope, a device for playing motion pictures; commonly considered the first ever movie projector.



His pictures were very interesting because if you look at one, you see the object at that very second, but the minute you see them all lined up its as if you were watching him jump in person. For that time period, this science and the ability to take such clear, freeze-frame pictures is truly amazing.


For this assignment we have to take freeze-frame, stop-motion pictures. One of the most important things about this assignment is your camera settings. Shutter speed priority (TV) will allow you to take more pictures and capture the movement easier. The white balance has to be turned onto either sunny or cloudy day (these photos need to be taken outside) and your ISO should be started at 400 and changed accordingly to the aperture. Putting your camera on continuous shooting will also allow better motion pictures.

Famous Photographer (Alfred Stieglitz)

Alfred Stieglitz was a famous photographer during the twentieth century. He was born in New Jersey in 1864. He was a revolutionist in the world of photography being the first of many to view photography as expressive and artful as drawings or paintings. As an editor of the magazine Camera Notes he shared his beliefs about cameras and the new world of photography. He took care in producing his images, utilizing elements of nature like steam, snow, and rain in his photographs to make the composition better.




This is my favorite picture of Stieglitz's. The focus is obviously the hands and I think its fascinating how quickly they catch your attention. I love the black and the white contrast, it's beautiful.



What's cool about this photo was that it was new. this had never been done before. In the modern times today we've seen this photo a thousand times, the gondolas in Venice- the perfect scene. But when you realize that this is the first of its kind that is what makes it so special. The color is really cool too,the different shades of grey and brown I think its fascinating.



I also really like this photo mainly because of it's composition. The two levels of the ship, contrasting the rich and the poor is amazing. One of the reasons this photo was so shocking to me and probably many others at the time was because if you were rich, you didn't know about the poor, you pretended they didn't exist. These two social classes didn't coexist in the same world and to have a photo in which they are compared out in the open like that is invigorating.

Post-assignment evaluation (Paul Strand)

A big part of the Paul Strand assignment was to get very contrasting colors of black and white. I knew I wanted interesting subjects for these photos so I went to East Gloucester near the Marina. I basically just let the camera do the work, photographing everything that was contrasting in colors or had a cool composition and shadow. It was difficult to see what would be a good photo because you take them in color but you need to see how they would look in black and white. I actually found the water very interesting because since it was shallow you could see the things under water. I think that seaweed is kind of mysterious and in black and white I think it looked really cool. This assignment was fun and it helps you envision what would look good in black and white even when you are seeing it in color.