PHOTOGRAPHY

                  This was week five of our winter term and on Tuesday we had a guest lecture presenter come in and show us a style of art that he finds interesting. His name is Craig Hickman and he came to show us the style of art called photography. I personally have always been intrigued with photography and how it can capture moments in real life. Another reason that I was interested with this lecture/slideshow was the different techniques that photography, as an art, has.  By this I mean how a photographer can add flash, change lighting, add or drop color, add artsy qualities to the photo and also how an artist can use Photoshop. There seems to be so many elements involved with creating photographs or adding to the finishing piece. I have to admit that I wasn’t much of a fan of some of the work that was shown because it wasn’t a style that I am particularly fond of. For example the photos of two people standing together, I just wasn’t to moved by it.  The work that I did really enjoy was actually the work that Craig did himself. The work that he showed us at the end of the presentation was really neat and creative. Craig would take photos of random sightings that he found interesting and then he would go back in later and add creative features to the photo. I thought that was cool because it added something unrealistic and different to what seemed like a normal photo. His work with finished photos kind of reminded me of Michael’s work because its taking something that we would look at then take a double look and realize that something is off about it. Its taking the normal and making it un-normal. To me this type of art is awesome and I can tell that Craig uses his imagination constantly to be able to take a photo of something then go I want to add this in there and so on. An artist that Craig showed on his slideshow whose work I find to be equally as entertaining as Craig’s, was Tony Mendoza.  The photos that Tony takes are different then anything I have seen before. I was prone to laughing while we viewed his work because most of the work that he has on his website is photos of his dog and cat. It was bizarre seeing these photos but at the same time I found myself wanting to see more. Tony takes his camera down to the dog’s feet level and snaps a photo of the dog, but what’s cool with Tony’s style is that he has these really cool environments in the background.  This makes the dog or whatever he is taking a photo of really stand out against the background and also adds life.

           

              For this week we are doing our reading on photographer Alfredo Jaar. Alfredo gets his inspiration to do art from tragedies that are happening around the world. It’s a real life event that he is trying to respond to in his work. Before going to Rwanda for the project he tells us that he was astonished that more people weren’t trying to help after being told what was going on there, “35,000 bodies in a 5 line story, on page 7”. Alfredo had enough and he went to Rwanda for 6 years and made twenty-one pieces.  I really admire Alfredo because he is able to take one single photograph and in that one single photograph, there is a whole story. A gallery piece that he did that touched me was the stack of pictures that represented the amount of people who had died. But what was the most shocking was the picture of the child’s eyes on all the photos that portrayed sadness and anger at the same time. This was a photo taken of a child who had watched his motherand father die right before him. In the photos we can see the child’s pain and suffereing.  Alfredo does a great job in capturing emotions in one single shot and then being able to add to that afterwards in his gallery is just amazing.

            

          To state the obvious, both artists Craig and Alfredo use photography as a tool or outlet to show what they are feeling.  Craig likes to take photos and add his sense of humor to them. Alfredo likes to get involved with what is going on in the world today and wants people to learn something from his work. But what I thought was cool that Alfredo mentions is that we need to blend beauty with horror.  I think that this applies to all artists. In Tony Mendoza’s photos of flowers we can see that they are beautiful but with Tony’s skills at the camera we are able to get more life from the flower. I find that an interesting thing about photography is how much emotion can come from a picture. I really enjoyed looking through all these photographers’ pieces because even though they all use the same tool for art, each picture has its own personal story and creativity to it.