Photographer Research – Joel Meyerowitz

Tags

art, artist, Joel Meyerowitz, Photographer, Photography

“Photography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you’re alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there’s everything, next moment it’s gone. Photography is very philosophical.” – Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions. Whilst working in a New York advertising agency as an art director, his boss sent him to a studio where Robert Frank was taking photographs that were going to be used of the cover of a book. After seeing Robert Frank at work, moving around the room clicking away, always clicking at the right moment, Joel knew he wanted a change of career, quit his job and became a photographer.

Known as a street photographer, in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, and a landscape and portrait photographer, he began photographing in colour in 1962 and was an early advocate of its use during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of colour photography as serious art. In the early 1970s he taught the first colour course at the Cooper Union in New York where many of today’s renowned colour photographers studied with him.

He is the author of 17 books including Cape Light, considered a classic work of colour photography, and his newly released book by Aperture, Legacy: The Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks. I have not found many of his images on-line, but managed to find some for Cape Light on Tumblr. I have to say I like a lot of the photographs I found in this series, I just so love the light (it reminds me I need to get back on track with my Light project :-)).

JOEL MEYEROWITZ – Laundry, Cape Cod, 1982

Bay Sky, First Light, 1987 by Joel Meyerowitz

Hartwig House by Joel Meyerowitz

Within a few days of the September 11th  attacks on the New York World Trade Centre in 2001, after being told by a woman police officer that photographs weren’t allowed because it was a crime scene, Meyerowitz contacted some people he knew and began to create an archive of the destruction and recovery at Ground Zero and the immediate neighbourhood. He went on to publish a book titled: Aftermath: World Trade Centre Archive. Some of his photographs from the book can be found on this website here.

Joel Meyerowitz. – World Trade Center, Archive Project. 2001

Moving the Monument 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz. – World Trade Center, Archive Project. 2001

Unfortunately Joel’s new website is under construction, stating it is coming in 2015, so I will watch this space. I have though subscribed to Joel’s blog on WordPress where he is doing a Project 365 and writing about each photograph he takes.

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All the above images and quotes were taken from the following websites:

Joel Meyerowitz: Website (2015). [Online]
(Accessed: 8th May 2015).

Joel Meyerowitz: BOOKS: AFTERMATH: WTC Archive (2003-2006). [Online] 
(Accessed: 8th May 2015).

Joel Meyerowitz: WordPress blog (2015). [Online] (Accessed: 8th May 2015].

Exhibition – Kunsthauswien – [Online] (Accessed 8th May 2015)

Jackson Fine Art [Online] (Accessed 8th May 2015)

The Slide Projector [Online] (Accessed 8th May 2015)

Erik Kim Photography [Online] (Accessed 8th May 2015)

Photographer research: Ray Metzker

Tags

art, black and white, fine art, learning, Photography, Ray Metzker

I had slightly mixed emotions about some of Trent Parke’s work so I wanted to look at other artists who are known for their use of light and shadow.

Ray K. Metzker (September 10, 1931 – October 9, 2014) was a major American photographer known for both his work in cityscape and landscape photography and for his large “multiples”, assemblages of printed strips and single frames.

He described the power of light in an image in a very similar way to Trent explaining that it can “transform the ordinary into a visual delight”. He repeatedly pushed an idea or a technique to the extreme, discovering its limits and its potential.

Many of his street photographs exhibit what Henri Cartier-Bresson refers to as the “Decisive Moment” — that moment in which all the subjects and details in a scene come together just perfectly in your viewfinder.

I find that there is something more appealing and intriguing about Ray’s images despite the similarities in their work and the darkness of some of his images, which surprised me as I usually like much lighter and airier images.

I feel that possibly Trent is trying to show the sometimes gritty truth about life whereas Ray’s work seems to be more about the beauty of the everyday caused by the way the light falls in a moment of time on the subject.

Ray’s work was earlier than that of Trent. Trent’s work, as shown in my previous post on famous photographers, were all taken between 1998 and 2004, these though, to me they appear timeless although they were taken during the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps Ray Metzker may have had an influence on the work of Trent Parke?

Here’s a short biography on Metzker by the New York City-based Laurence Miller Gallery:

“Ray K. Metzker has quietly been making extraordinary photographs for the better part of six decades. Today, he is recognized as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who has pursued his chosen medium passionately for fifty years. 

Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago–a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus– from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920’s. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarization and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary.  He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker’s unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow and line transform the ordinary in the realm of pure visual delight.

Major American museums began showing an interest in Metzker’s work in the 1960’s. Cementing his reputation as a master photographer, the museum of Modern Art in New York gave him his first one-man show in 1967. Retrospectives were organized in 1978 by the International Center of Photography in New York, and in 1984 by the Museum of fine Arts in Houston. The Houston exhibit was subsequently shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the International Museum of Photography, Rochester, and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.”

Head on over to the Laurence Miller Gallery website (the link can be found below) to see many more of Metzker’s photographs, you will not be disappointed.

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All the above images and quotes were taken from the following websites:

– Getty

 – Laurence Miller Gallery

– Wikipedia

– Jackson Fine Art

Photographer research: Jacques Henri Lartigue

Tags

art, fine art, Jacques Henri Lartigue, journal, Photography

“I take photographs with love, so I try to make them art objects. But I make them for myself first and foremost–that is important. If they are art objects at the same time, that’s fine with me.” –  – Jacques-Henri Lartigue

by Jacques Henri Lartigue

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894 -1986) was born into a wealthy French family. He was noted for his sincere, often playful presentation of friends, family and also French society at play.

by Jacques Henri Lartigue

At the age of six, with his fathers help he began taking photos and sketching his neighbours and family in action in his diary. His father then continued to feed his passion and bought him cameras that became increasingly more and more sophisticated. This lead him to skillfully move into a period of sports photography which in turn lead to stunning images of early automobile races.

by Jacques Henri Lartigue

Although rarely seen, many of his early images were taken in stereo. He was an experimental artist and an avid painter-working with varying film sizes and development processes including some of the earliest autochromes.

His greatest achievement was his set of around 120 huge photograph albums, which compose the finest visual autobiography ever produced. While he sold a few photographs in his youth, mainly to sporting magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, in middle age he concentrated on his painting, and it was only at the age of 29 that his early photographs were discovered by Charles Rado of Rapho Agency. Rado introduced Lartigue to John Szarkowski, the curator of the MOMA, New York, who then put on an exhibition of his work.

From this, there was a photo spread in Life magazine in 1963, which was in the issue which commemorated the death of John Kennedy, ensuring the widest possible audience for his pictures.

After this point, Lartigue was very often pursued by fashion magazines and international publications for his work, and he was commissioned in 1974 to shoot an official portrait of the newly elected president of France (May 27, 1974 – May 21, 1981), Valéry Giscard d’Estaing which later lead to his first French retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.

His influence can be seen even following his passing, in the work of American Director Wes Anderson whose film Rushmore includes shots inspired by the artist. Lartigue’s likeness was also the basis for fellow artist Lord Mandrake’s character in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

by Jacques Henri Lartigue

For me his quote about taking photos for himself resonates true as this is my sole reason for shooting, yes I have taken photos that are for sale with Getty, yes I have shot a couple of weddings and portrait sessions for friends and friends of friends, but nothing I find better and more satisfying than just shooting what I want, when I want and how I want.

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All the above images were taken from the following websites:

– At Get Photography (Accessed 23 February 2015)

– Wikipedia (Accessed 23 February 2015)

Photographer research: André Kertész

Tags

André Kertész, art, fine art, journal, Photography, street photography

“The moment always dictates in my work…Everybody can look, but the don’t necessarily see…I see a situation and I know that it’s right.”- André Kertész

After seeing episode 1 of the documentary by the BBC called The Genius of Photography I decided to do a little more research on André Kertész as I loved the work that was mentioned in this programme.

by Andre Kertesz

André Kertész (1894–1985), born Kertész Andor, he was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and photo journalism. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style stopped his work from gaining wide recognition. He though is hailed as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Working intuitively, he captured the poetry of modern urban life with its quiet, often overlooked incidents and odd, occasionally comic, or even bizarre juxtapositions. Neither a surrealist, nor a strict photojournalist, he nevertheless infused his best images with strong tenets of both. “You don’t see” the things you photograph, he explained, “you feel them.”

by Andre Kertesz

He earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the Hungarian Academy of Commerce in 1912 and soon found a job working as a clerk at the Budapest Stock Exchange. He did not enjoy his work and just saw it as being a means to an end. It allowed him to buy his first camera at the age of 18 and immediately began to make intimate portraits of his family and friends, studies of the Hungarian countryside, and he brought it with him when he was drafted into the army two years later. After his military service, photography was not paying well enough to make a leaving, so he returned to the stock exchange and remained there for the next seven years. In 1925, he immigrated to France to live the life of a bohemian artist.

by Andre Kertesz

All of his family was left behind, including his fiancé Elizabeth. As with many others at the time, Paris was an inspiration for Kertész. For the next decade he photographed the streets of the French metropolis and finally marry his fiancé.

by Andre Kertesz

In 1936, the Keyston Agency in New York City lead him to cross the Atlantic. This though proved to be a mistake for his career. A year after joining the Keyston Agency, he cancelled the contract but was left with few options of what to do next. World War II was developing and made a return to Paris at that time impossible. At the same time, the US government treated him like an enemy of the state and prevented him from publishing for many years. Once the war was over, all of Kertész’s momentum was gone. It wasn’t until 1964, when Museum of Modern Art curator John Sarkowski organised a show for André, that his career finally took off again and the art world began to appreciate his work, this continued throughout the 70s and 80s and he was exhibited across the world. Towards end of his life, he would be one of the first to experiment with Polaroid’s SX-70 cameras. In 1983, the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor, he also received numerous honorary doctorates, lifetime achievement awards, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in New York.. He died at the age of 91 in New York.

by Andre Kertesz

While searching the internet for information I stumbled across this blog which is really worth a read, in this article he discusses 10 lessons that can be learnt from studying André Kertész:

• Always have a camera with you
• Follow your dreams
• Take a higher perspective
• Focus on geometry and form
• Experiment with different equipment
• Feel what you photograph
• Be patient for the right moment
• Stay an amateur
• Be satisfied
• Stay hungry

by Andre Kertesz

I know I will take away quite a lot from looking at Andre Kertesz’s work and also the articles I have read about him although I personally do not like his more surreal work I do find that like with Trent Parke I could look at his street work for hours dissecting the photographs to see why they work so well and hopefully become better at seeing situations because of it, I guess only time will tell!

By Andre-Kertesz

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All the above images were taken from the following websites:

– Wikipedia (Accessed 21 February 2015)

–Erik Kim Street Photography Blog (Accessed 21 February 2015)

– At Get Photography (Accessed 22 February 2015)

– Photographers Gallery (Accessed 22 February 2015)

Photographer research: Trent Parke

Tags

art, Photography, shadow, street photography, Trent Parke

“I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical.” Trent Parke

I decided to google photographers that are famous for capturing light and shadows and stumbled across Trent Parke’s work.

He was born in Newcastle, Australia in 1971 and now lives in Adelaide. He has won many photography awards and his work has been widely exhibited, including solo exhibitions in New York, London and Germany. “Minutes To Midnight” was shown at The Australian Centre for Photography in January/February 2005, in conjunction with the Sydney Festival, and became the most highly-attended show in the recorded history of the ACP.

According to the many profiles written about Trent Parke he is the only Australian photographer who has been able to join the Magnum group. This group pride themselves on being photographers who have “powerful individual vision”.

In his street work Trent has said that he uses harsh shadows to eliminate visual clutter such as modern advertising, which gives the images he creates a timeless feeling. The effect of this is to simplify the overall image and it also creates some unusual compositions that you simply don’t see day-to-day. They seem to have quite a dark mood as the harsh light in Australia creates such sharp contrasts, the blacks deep, so the pockets of sunlight add both tension and drama.

Trent has stated that by getting rid of the “crap” it can help you to make sense of the scene. Looking at Trent’s work has really made me question how I feel about the use of light in my work, the image below is the sort of exposure that many people would advise against, but Trent has used this narrow beam of light to create a very powerful shot. He obviously exposed for the shadows and with perfect timing captured the person wearing white (or a very light colour) walking through the beam of light, which blew the highlights, giving this person a quite angelic and surreal feeling.

Trent has commented on how quite often he’ll look back on a piece of work and wonder how on Earth it came about. The camera can capture images which just aren’t visible to the human eye.

I found that I was quite mesmerised by some of his black and white street photography work and really admire the work that he does with light and shadow and I find many of his images to be awe-inspiring and it makes me want to try street photography again.

After looking into his work I found the quote at the start of my post by Trent Parke aptly describes some of his work which does seem to verge on the surreal often giving it that magical feeling that he describes.

While researching Trent I stumbled across this video on him and his partner Narelle Autio which is worth watching it is so inspiring.

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All the above images and quotes were taken from the following websites:

 –   Magnum Photographers (accessed 18 February 2015)

 –   In Public (accessed 18 February 2015)

–    Stills website (accessed 18 February 2015)

–    Wikipedia (accessed 18 February 2015)