4900 Klein

Kertesz as a Hungarian-born photographer distinguished by haunting composition in his photographs and by his early efforts in developing the photo essay. In his lifetime, however, his then-unorthodox camera angles, which hindered prose descriptions of his works, prevented his work from gaining wider recognition, as well as his use of symbolism also became unfashionable later in his life.

I think his photograph has excellent visual effects. When I look his pictures I feel like each his photograph has story, and the picture tell the story to people. I really love his pictures especially street pictures and some objects. He used very well light and shade, and also I think his structure of photograph is very interesting.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus is an American-Jewish photographer. She was born on March, 1923.  Arbus grew up in a wealthy family. Her parents owned a famous store on 5^th avenue called Russek’s. At the age of eighteen, she married Allan Arbus. Diane and Allan have two daughters, one of them became photographer, and the other one became writer. After the World War Two, the Arbuses started a commercial photography business called “Diane & Allan Arbus”. After ten years, Arbus quit the commercial photography business however she started photographing on assignment for magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and The Sunday Times Magazine in 1959. In 1963, Arbus was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project on “American rites, manners, and customs”. Arbus was able to establish a strong personal relationship with her subjects and re-photographing some of them over many years. During the 1960s Arbus taught photography at the Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York City, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. The first major exhibition of her photographs occurred at the Museum of Modern Art.

Arbus’s notable works include:

“Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962”,  

“Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.1967”.

Photographers are able to express themselves through their photographs. Many of Diane’s photographs carry loneliness, sadness, and misunderstanding. On the first photo, there is a boy, Colin Wood, who has toy hand grenade. His facial expression is maniacal. She took many photographs of this boy and on the other photographs he looks like a happy child. Colin Wood said later “She catches me in a moment of exasperation… My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned…” I believe that Arbus include her character, personality, deep feelings into her works. Another work, 2^nd  photograph, Identical Twins depicts two young twin sisters. This photo has been said to sum up Arbus’ vision: normality in freakiness and the freakiness in normality. In this photo I think Arbus saw herself. She was experiencing mood swings and in this photo we see happy and sad faces. It could be different sides of Diane.

Arbus’s photographs are professional, have strong composition and more importantly speak for themselves. Her photographs carry meaning and her deep feelings. Arbus was doing commercial photography for over ten years shooting “perfect” people for fashion magazines which she hated. Thus, she turned her attention to regular people, she found herself in her subjects and build strong relationships with them. I think Diane was extremely talented and she was seeing something special about her subjects.

Paul Strand documented people, work, culture and artifacts of life by way of photography.  His work came during a revitalization period for art.  He redefined the photographic medium by creating work that reflected the time(s) and documented history.

“The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundamentally true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.” – Paul Strand

Paul Strand (born in New York, 1890; died in Orgeval, France, 1976) was one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. He studied under Lewis Hine, going on to be celebrated by Alfred Stieglitz and David Alfaro Siqueiros. After World War II, Strand traveled around the world—from New England to Ghana, France to the Outer Hebrides—to photograph.  Influenced by modern painting and sculpture in 1916 Strand began to deviate from his contemporaries and attempted to make artistic photography without manipulation of camera or the photo’s development.  Geometric shapes, pattern, space, light and shadow along with framing force the onlooker into taking their time to contemplate what they are seeing.  This was part of what made Strand stand out and become one of the masters of the photographic medium.

When referring to Paul Strand many will mention his “Blind” photo (1916) or “Wall Street” (1915) but I am most captivated by his “Porch Shadows” (1916).  Here he has the viewer pause and refers to geometric form.  The image is full of light and shadow creating compositional diagonals.  Abstraction through fragmentation is created by framed content and harmony. The sunlight used here warms the image and yet the structure of the image is very staunch in its placing.

Strand wrote that true modernists should avoid all “tricks of process or manipulation” to celebrate photography’s inherent qualities as art.

Lee Friedlander is a famous American photographer born on July 14, 1934. Lee attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena where he studied photography. Lee started his career shooting record covers for jazz musicians in New York City, and later on moved onto freelance commercial work. Lee’s work is known for captivating the development of “American social landscapes.” His photographs were able to capture a look into the modern life of his era. Some of his work were photos of the “detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and signs…”

As I looked into his work I noticed that it mainly consisted of street photography and self portraits. My favorite style was the street photography front the 1960s, because it was shot in black and white. I like the way Lee captures people in their surroundings at the right moment making the photo look natural and not posed. The photograph of the man walking in while a woman walks out a building is a perfect example of capturing an image at its precise moment. Another interesting aspect of this particular photo is that, the viewer is not able to make out neither the man’s or the woman’s face. His photos are also able to blend non-living objects with people, and somehow makes it interesting to the eye. I enjoy the way Lee is able to incorporate shadows and reflections in his work. Lee also took a lot of portraits images, and some consisted of naked women. The images of the women were taken in unusual positions, and although the women were completely naked, the way Lee captured the images made me look at it in an artistic even though the photos made the covers of Playboy magazine. One of Lee’s photos was of Madonna when she was young, that photo sold for nearly $38,000. I really enjoy street photography which is why I enjoyed Lee’s work.

Walker Evans was an American photographer who lived from 1903 to 1975. Evans is best known for documenting the effects of the Great Depression through his pictures. He was known to use a large-format, 8×10-inch camera. Most of his work was shot in black and white.

Evans is credited as the originator of documentary photography, being one of the first to record American history through the lens of a camera. Evans focused on the common man, and in his common surroundings. His work captured people at their most vulnerable moments on the streets, cafes, and homes of America during the Great Depression. These images are now deeply rooted in our minds, and have shaped our perspective of living in America during that time.

Evans style worked because it focuses on the reality of the moment, as opposed to just trying to depict beauty in things, as was popular at the time with the European modernism style. I feel that this was an extremely important step in photography, because it gave the photographer the power to influence how future generations could view past generations through their work.

The honesty of Evans pictures, given the circumstances, is what most stands out to me as a photography student. Nothing seems staged or fixed, instead the reality of the dire moments are perfectly capture in his pictures.

Evans simple portraits are most impactful. The way the contrasting tones of black and white reflect off his subjects face imply a time long ago, but that cannot be forgotten. The spirit of the person is what I feel jumps off the picture. In these moments I feel Evans has captured that specific moment in time, when these people were both afraid yet nevertheless resolved to succeed.

Walker Evans pictures resonate with us today because we see a fragment of ourselves in them. We can relate to the people and the places, not only because it’s our history, but also because it’s the history of the human spirit captured in a picture.

Berenice Abbott is remembered as a one of the most intended and independent photographers in 20^th century. She was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898.

She had an unhappy childhood and she dropped out of the Ohio state university in 1918. After she quit university, she moved to New York, Greenwich Village and she derived inspiration from people who work in different fields such as a writer and a philosopher. She went to Europe in 1921 and studied sculpture in Paris and Berlin. She changed her name as Berenice. She became interested with photography in 1923 and Man Ray hired her as an assistant. He impressed her darkroom work and he allowed her to use studio and take her own photography. She grew very fast and has first solo exhibition in 1926.

Her photographic subject was people. She loved to take pictures of people in literature. However, her famous photography is landscape of New York. In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugene Atgets who is a documentary photographer. Berenice was so influenced by Eugene Atgets’s photograph. Atgets took pictures about street sense of Paris before modernization. In 1929 Abbot went back to New York for publishing Atget’s photography, but she impressed and moved New York. She photographed New York and she admired in Eugene Atgets.

Abbott worked on her New York project alone in 6 years without supports. She finally was hired by Federal Art Project and worked as a supervisor for Changing New York projects. Her photography is very important and heavyweight for sociological study because it shows people’s life in the great depression. Also, her photography shows aspect of urban life. She took pictures of diverse people of the city and their daily activity and architecture of the city. I got impressed her pictures a lot because it has totally different atmosphere of New York. Her photography is classic and cinematic because some pictures have soft contrast. Moreover, composition and angle of photo is very unique. I can feel of the rapidly changing circumstance of the city and people’s life during the great depression. I think she just wanted to commemorate past, she wanted to record more meaning.

When I took photography class my final portfolio them was people in New York and I really like to take photos of city landscape. I really admire her passion and her talent because I know the difficulties of taking pictures in New York. Her photography shows her dynamic experiences and knowledge.