Last blog entry for Fall 2013

Grades have been submitted and all portfolios are ready to be picked up. Portfolios left over break will be stored until the second week of the spring term then tossed. Please pick your work up in a timely manner.

I had a great semester with you all, keep up the good work and keep pushing that shutter button. Remember what I told you on the first class, you can't get better at this by sitting on your ass, drinking coffee and bullshitting about making photographs, you need to actually get out there and make them!

End of Semester Countdown

Here is the end of term dates you need to keep in mind:

December 3-self portrait assignment #9 critique

December 5-work day with Stan-LAST DAY TO SUBMIT ASSIGNMENTS FOR GRADES

December 10-leave final portfolios on or before this date

December 19-portfolios returned

You will need to submit a minimum of 15 prints of which 5 need to be matted or mounted. The 15 may be thematic or greatest hits from the work you did this fall. The work must be in a reusable container.

Assignment #7 Studio Nude

The female nude – magical, erotic, aesthetic – has been modeled and painted since prehistory. Appearing rarely and awkwardly in the earliest art, she attained fulfillment and glory in ancient Greece. In their idealized treatment of the nude, The Greeks established a standard that only the asceticism of the Middle Ages ignored. The artists of the Renaissance and their successors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revived the nude, and by the 1930’s she was again a conventional form. It was inevitable that she should become a favorite subject of photography. - Peter Lacey

Bring one print to class for critique onNovember 19th.

Model will be supplied during in class shoot on November 7, students may of course photograph a model of their own choosing.

Assignment #6 Studio Portrait

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense . . .symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are. - Richard Avedon

Photography can be an additive practice as we have discussed in class, but no where is this more evident than the lighting studio. You begin with a black room, add a back ground, set lights, determine  camera angle and lastly choose a subject.

In this assignment you will enlist the help of a human subject, no younger than 14 years old and photograph them under controlled lighting conditions in the lighting studio. Pay attention to direction of main and fill lights and ratio between each source. In the studio, everything matters.

Richard Avedon

Artists to research are: Karsh, Avedon, Halsman, Leibovitz, Scavullo and Penn.

Submit a minimum of one print for critique November 12th,

Assignment #5 Appropriation/Simulation

•       Appropriate/simulate a pre-existing image.

•       Image can be art historical, cinematic, cultural, fashion, etc.

•       Bring original image along with 1 to 2 prints for critique

•       How will you appropriate this image?  Reconstructing based on original?  Adding or subtracting parts from the original?  Highlighting how that image is read differently in contemporary culture? 

•       How does the medium of photography relate to your appropriated image?

•       Must have brief statement.  Why did you choose to appropriate this image?  What have you changed or not changed?  Why?  How have you re-contextualized the image? Etc.

Cindy Sherman

Further Reading

•       Statements on Appropriation by Michalis Pichler

•       Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

•       Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

•       Appropriation (Whitechapel: Documents on Contemporary) Art by David Evans

Artists

•       Today: Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Demand

•       More artists (not strictly photographers) using appropriation: Chapman brothers, Barbara Krueger, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Shepard Fairey, Hans Haacke, Damien Hirst, Joseph Kosuth, Louise Lawler,  Robert Rauschenberg, John Stezaker, Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, and many more.

Assignment due October 31

Assignment #4 Environmental portrait

Lewis Hine

Bring one print to class for critique on October 22.