Photographer Presentation 6

Pedro Meyer

Born In Spain, Meyer is now based in Mexico. He is one of the leading photographers in the digital revolution. He also edits, and curates other photography. He originally started as a documentary photographer but with the emergence of digital he went down a different road. He makes images by compositing.

Interesting fact, he was the first to include a CD with images and sound combined, and also one of the first to feature digital prints.

http://www.pedromeyer.com/heresies/heresies.html


John Wood

Wood’s signature is the idea of incorporating other mediums into his work including painting, lithographs and drawings.

Interesting fact is he was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. Studied photography post war and moved to New York where he started his career as an artist.

http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/johnwood/woodphotos.html

Midterm Review

My midterm project is a fragmented assessment of a random day in my life here at MSU. I decided to pick Tuesday, for what reason I do not know. I shot thousands of photographs that incorporated my interactions with my closest friends and people who are very close to me. I then edited the images together with music. The removal of the sound and the breakdown of a conversation into single frames really capture the moments and emotions that I encounter every day, and many of them are lost in the mix. This project has made me really look deeper into my interactions and moments in my life.

My framing and perspective is based on my perspective and view of the world. As I’m shooting massive amounts of stills to create and illusion of moving images, the focus on each singular image is somewhat less. I’m more on overall composition for each segment. My goal is to come across as being intimate and personal. This is a view into my daily life. That being so, most portions of the piece are very “gritty” in nature. I shoot on the move with no setup. I am out to capture the moment, not stage one at this juncture. Later on as my project develops, I hope to incorporate a staged and controlled production element.

The idea of stop motion videos is far from being a new concept. It has so many different applications that it really is its own genre. I have been fascinated by both still and moving photography my whole life. Here at MSU I have studied both halves intensely, but I have never explored the bridge between the two. This project is my first dabbling in this. At the very core what I am shooting are individual pictures, but I am shooting them in such large amounts, that I am able to even sometimes convince the audience that I am using a video camera. I am enjoying experimenting with the different frame rates, by slowing down certain images and then doing speedy sequences. This lets the viewer bounce back and forth and question how I produced the piece. When I spot a subtlety or a meaningful expression, I have the ability to linger on it longer. Truthfully however, at this point I have let the pauses I’ve come across happen randomly. Thus far I have edited to the beat of the music, keeping pacing semi aligned with that of the beat. When a longer pause or hard note hits in the track, I may extend the frame above it longer. This has allowed me to take a closer look at my interactions with the friends who I have incorporated. I get to see for a single moment what their true feeling was to the specific situation, something that happens thousands of times per interaction. These single moments are rare for us to reflect on in our daily interactions. Often times, they only come when looking at a photograph. I like this process of speeding up and slowing moments in time, and it is really offering a small window for an audience to see who I am and through my eyes. At the same time, its allowing me a deeper look into my own world and those I share it with.

Honestly at this point, I see my project on the verge of taking off. I really had a what I though was a clear vision at the beginning, but as I progressed it opened so many new doors I became just as lost as I was before coming up with the idea. I think now though, I have a firm grasp on the specific things I want to produce as this piece evolves into a final work. I also have now worked several times with the actual assembly process, and I know what will work and what won’t. At this point I hope to work through more of these daily interactions, and maybe even progress the titles to featured in the daily piece to larger more generic groupings. Near the end of the piece, I want to incorporate a fabricated and choreographed scene, showing how as a director and producer, I work to create images. Yet at the same time, this project will showcase the images I often take for granted every day when I find myself thinking about the “planned” ones.

Joe Ractliff

From what I could find online, there is very little bio published on Jo Ractliffe. She is however, very active in her work and has been featured in many large exhibitions and continues to do so. Jo Ractliffe was born in 1961 in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed both her Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Cape Town. In 1999 she was the recipient of the Vita Art Prize.

Some of her most famous Solo exhibitions include Terreno Ocupado in Johannesburg in 2008. She has also featured work in several group exhibitions including the seventh Gwangju Biennale, in Korea three years ago. She also participated in Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Centre for Photography, New York. Today she lives and works in Johannesburg.
To explore her themes of a "revelation of absence", Johannesburg artist Jo Ractliffe draws on a range of photographic and art practices, including snapshot, documentary, forensic and studio photography, as well as installation video and projections.

One critic writes, "It is not accidental, that Ractliffe has chosen photography as the medium most suited to her thematics. Photography occupies a beautifully, maddeningly awkward space between otherness and the real, between art and documentary journalism".

In her own words Ractliffe states, "What interests me are things that are ephemeral - desire, loss, longing - and their relationship to photography. I am also curious about what we don't expect from photographs, what they leave out, their silence and the spaces they occupy between 'reality' and 'desire'. I try to work in an area between the things we know and things we don't know; what sits outside the frame. I am interested in exploring these oblique and furtive 'spaces of betweenness', and in how they figure in producing meaning in a mode of representation that seems so often predicated on specificity and transparency. Photography is quite a resistant and unforgiving medium."

Most of Ractliffe’s photographs are shot in black and white. She seems to have re-occurring themes of depth in her photos. Many have a distinct fore, middle, and background aspect to them. They are very documentary in approach, and show the gritty nature of South Africa and Johannesburg and its people. In her photographs that feature people as the subjects, they seem to be somewhat set up, yet maintain the surprise of a chance juxtaposition. What I mean by this is that Ractliffe is able to draw an expression of personality from the people she photographs. It seems genuine, and not set up. She is very talented at pulling the true story from the environment she photographs.