Jason Agnew_Photographers 5&6

 

            Wilfred Ukpong: Blazing Century 1

                        Wilfred Ukpong is a Nigerian born artist that works out of the UK, France, and Nigeria. He uses multiple mediums in their work like photography, sculpture, music/sound, video, film, and performance. His main focuses are socio-political an environmental issues, he uses community engagement and staged narrative style photographs in order to get his message across. Ukpong's work in Blazing Century 1 appeals to me because of his ability to create a cinematic feel that also feels like it pulls you into a different time and place. His photographs give an uneasy idea of the future that is almost alien instead of familiar. I find his work very inspiring.  

http://lenscratch.com/2022/05/wilfred-ukpong/

                    Jari Poulin: Senses in Animate

                                    Jari Poulin is a photographer with an interesting background that is shown through her photography. With a past in dancing and choreography, you can see how she tries to incorporate movement in her work. In her project, Senses in Animate, she uses multiples exposures of peoples portraits in order to create a surreal and almost ethereal effect of movement in the photos. This inspires me because I have always liked the idea of toying with the technicalities of my camera like long exposures or compositing multiple exposures in order to create interesting and unique effects. 

http://lenscratch.com/2021/10/jari-poulin-senses-in-animate/

Christian Lamm Photographers 5&6

 Alexander Harding

LenScratch

Alexander Harding is an American photographer from Boston, MA. His work deals heavily with light and refraction, specifically from the sun. I love the abstraction in his photos, and the ambiguity of shapes and colors. He said, "Through my work I wish to remain grateful to light, which enables our ability to see, reminding us that perception itself is a gift." I thought this was relevant to my project, having to do with the ability to see and perceive. 

Jonas Yip

LenScratch

Jonas Yip is a photographic artist focused in Los Angeles, California. He uses alternative processes to create his images, often manipulating chemicals with polaroid film. A lot of his work has to do with youth and nostalgia, capturing these ideas in unconventional abstract ways. 

Tiara Harris_Photographer 5&6

Stephanie Shih is a still-life photographer, known for her unique use of shadows applied to playful perspectives on food. As a second-generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, she uses her work to explore themes of cultural dynamics, acceptance, alienation, appropriation, celebration, and beauty through her still-lifes.

Timothy Brill is a still-life photographer born and raised in New York City before moving and settling down in Portland OR. Brill initially photographed traditional black-and-white darkroom landscapes, but soon moved into color and studio-based still-life work. When in the studio, Brill likes to create compositions that try to marry traditional painting and modern photographic sensibilities.

Elena Harris_Photographer 5&6

Wulf Bradley is an African American photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. Bradley focuses on the human experience, with an emphasis on human emotions in circumstance. Bradley utilizes lines, shapes, and physical features of the body to provoke thoughts about the individual from the viewer. 

Kalliope Amorphous explores dreamlike and surreal narratives that excavate the subconscious of her own self, as well as documenting the people around her. Amorphous favors themes such as identity, morality, time, and consciousness. She does this through the use of double exposures, reflections, mirrors, and blur. Kalliope often utilizes herself in her works, staging the self-portraits to be representations of the boundaries between "self" and "other", rather than taking the stereotypical autobiographical perspective. As I continue on this journey of "pulling a thread" I have become enamored with the surreal and subconscious nature of photography. In my day-to-day life, I too am incredibly hyper-aware of the state of being, and the passing of time as humans here in this realm. Much of the work that I create outside of the classroom is incredibly reminiscent of the styles of photographers like Kalliope and Bradley, utilizing similar themes as well as the black-and-white style, as an overall attempt to create evocative images. With this being said, I would like to develop this preexisting idea regarding the intimacy of a black man, and connect it to my preexisting infatuation surrounding the ideas of consciousness and being, specifically as it pertains to identity.

Madison Moreland Photographer 5&6

Linda Bournane Engelberth is a Norweigian artist and in her series Outside the Binary they focus on shooting people who find their identity not within the gender binary (boy or girl). The collection is of several people who come from around the world and each have a story attached. 

"The male and female gender identities are well established today. However, there are also people who feel they fall outside this binary. That is what this project focuses on; individuals who do not identify as simply male or female. The wonderful thing, then, about this project, is that it shows the people the debate revolves around, in peaceful portraits. Each photograph captures individual beauty, but also a universal humanity. We see people living their truths, presenting themselves with confidence and hope. What they want is the freedom to live out themselves this way".

                       http://lenscratch.com/2020/12/focus-on-norway-linda-bournane-engelberth/ 

We Are The Youth is a photo series which collectifies portraits of young adults who are within the LGBTQ+ community. Laura Golio is the photographer who has worked on several projects that represent different identies. 

http://lenscratch.com/2014/09/we-are-the-youth/

Julian Robbins_Photographers 5&6

FOCUS ON STILL LIFE: SUNJOO LEE

Sunjoo Lee is a mixed media artist and photographer that is based in Seoul, South Korea. She has a BA in Photography and MFA in Plastic Art & Photography from Chung-Ang University Graduate School of Photography in Seoul. With most of her works, she incorporates everyday objects and topics to express complex human emotions and feelings. Lee sees her still lifes as an extension of herself, in which the photography says, “I am my still life photography, where I incorporate ordinary things from everyday life, by visualizing various human philosophical thought and metaphysical phenomena such as death and life, existence and absence, invisible and memory — through my uniquely creative perspective and metaphorical way.” Bojagi by Sunjoo Lee is a still life photo-series that brings attention to the act of gift-giving. Fruit and valuable fruits are wrapped in silk and cotton as an act of praying, wishing, longing, and collecting as a way to consider the objects that we receive. 

FOCUS ON STILL LIFE: STEPHANIE SHIH: ASIAN AMERICAN STILL LIFE

Stephanie Shih is a still life photographer that is based in Los Angeles, that plays with various perspective and uses shadow to bring emphasis to normal foods.  Shih started photography with her dad’s half-frame camera on childhood road trips. Later on in life, Shih would pursue photography seriously while she was studying studying cognitive science. The photography would be a wedding maker during school, in which translating the experience of food fantasies to the visual image has been a topic that has been expressed thorough her still lifes. Themes of acceptance, alienation, appropriation, beauty, and celebration are incorporated in her recent works. 

Elena Harris_Photographers 3&4

Francesca Woodman

 Francesca Woodman was an American photographer best known for her black and white portraits, many of which featured herself. Woodman also often explored motifs in her work, some of which included: skulls, birds, and mirrors. Woodman was fond of double exposures and long shutter speeds, giving her work an ethereal, ghost-like feel. This style of photography meshed well with the themes she often explored, some of which included sexuality and the woman's body.During her time at RISD, Woodman spent a semester abroad in Rome where she created much of her infamous catalog. It was during this time in college, however, that Francesca deepened her fascination with fashion photographers and surrealists such as Man Ray and Claude Cauhn. Francesca became enamored with the act of combining unfamiliar locations with familiar objects to provoke uncanny feelings. I feel that although the subjects that Woodman and I are attempting to comment on are wildly different, there is still the same central idea of commenting on a person's appearance or personality in one way or the other, and whether or not this commentary, or lack thereof, is even appropriate at all in day-to-day life. 

Jordan Blake

 Jordan Blake is a Nigerian-American photographer, model, and director based in New York. Jordan is a visual story teller who has an intimate focus on self-portraits. This focus allows Blake to express not only himself as a person, but also serves as an outlet to capture the essence of a Black man, and what being Black means to him. Jordan "strives to showcase and celebrate Black skin through different forms of creativity inspired by different forms of Black experiences." I thoroughly enjoy Blake's take on the Black diaspora and the range of individuals and stories that he captures in a way that is more than a journalistic take on our day-to-day lives. Blake's use of color stories, sets, lighting, and costume design all come together effortlessly to produce images that allow the viewer to grasp the essence of the person in a way that they may not have in passing.