OliveOyl
Well-known member
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So...during “The Covid,” I've been taking a free online MOMA course about photography and tomorrow I’ll finish the final bit. It’s been a slog. But almost every night, I dutifully read the course material which means I haven't been reading any "regular" books and that’s an unusual thing because I get panicky without a good book by my side. But I’ll adjust. Times are strange.
This course talks about the ways that Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus - and others less known - have "documented" the world around them, and what that entailed (specifically, techniques and intentions). It also talked about how Alfred Stieglitz (primarily) and others associated with him, helped to push photography beyond the vernacular and into fine art. The viewer is supposed to try and decipher the photographer’s intention and evaluate their technical choices. The photographer in turn, tries to get the viewer to consider what’s real and what’s true, and how to read the narrative within an image. Hopefully, there’s a satisfying meeting of hearts and minds.
And...this might sound obvious, but I never really thought about the quick and compressed timeline of “photographic history" before. Because...I just like to look. And not think.
Anyway, the (new) photographer I'm liking at the moment is KATY GRANNAN who was originally from Massachusetts and is now in California. I was intrigued with a series of portraits that she took of “interesting looking” people she found on the street. She posed them against a stark white wall, under intense bright sunlight, which of course, highlighted every flaw. (Ah...but are they flaws, really?) Maybe Arty knows her work because her choice of subject seems to be similar to Mary Ellen Mark.
Grannan just made her first film which is, as it says in the link..."an intimate and unflinching portrait of a ravaged community living on Modesto's South Ninth Street -The Nine- a barren, forgotten street in California's Great Central Valley (the setting for The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange's Migrant.”). Seems like something right up my alley...
3 minute trailer
and more
http://theninefilm.com/
This course talks about the ways that Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus - and others less known - have "documented" the world around them, and what that entailed (specifically, techniques and intentions). It also talked about how Alfred Stieglitz (primarily) and others associated with him, helped to push photography beyond the vernacular and into fine art. The viewer is supposed to try and decipher the photographer’s intention and evaluate their technical choices. The photographer in turn, tries to get the viewer to consider what’s real and what’s true, and how to read the narrative within an image. Hopefully, there’s a satisfying meeting of hearts and minds.
And...this might sound obvious, but I never really thought about the quick and compressed timeline of “photographic history" before. Because...I just like to look. And not think.
Anyway, the (new) photographer I'm liking at the moment is KATY GRANNAN who was originally from Massachusetts and is now in California. I was intrigued with a series of portraits that she took of “interesting looking” people she found on the street. She posed them against a stark white wall, under intense bright sunlight, which of course, highlighted every flaw. (Ah...but are they flaws, really?) Maybe Arty knows her work because her choice of subject seems to be similar to Mary Ellen Mark.
Grannan just made her first film which is, as it says in the link..."an intimate and unflinching portrait of a ravaged community living on Modesto's South Ninth Street -The Nine- a barren, forgotten street in California's Great Central Valley (the setting for The Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange's Migrant.”). Seems like something right up my alley...
3 minute trailer
and more
http://theninefilm.com/
