Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Beginning at 1 P.M
Gallery Tour: The Nature of Landscape/The Nature of Photography
Sidney Mishkin
The theme of the gallery tour is Landscape and how that is incorporated into photography in different ways. Photography is art and so therefore, like other artists, photographers try to present the world to others in a different way. They transform the way the world is seen through their photographs. Through her photographs, photographer Marilyn Bridges showed how the world would look like from an bird’s eye view. She captures landscapes of different regions from her plane, as she is also an pilot. From thousands of miles above ground, the landscape looked to be more like patterns of different kinds than fields, mountains and ridges of land. One of my favorite photograph of hers was Kazhitna Glacier, Denali, Alaska. The photograph is taken above a river, before a mountain. The river takes appears to be broad at the fore of the photo but gets smaller and smaller until it reaches the mountain and disappears beyond the fog that surrounds. The mountain reaches towards the sky until is hidden behind clouds that hung low. It is a beautiful photo that shows off the scenery of the landscape in that region.
One of the most creative photographs found at the gallery was Lucien Clergue’s Four Nudes in the City, New York. From afar, the photo seems to be of mountains and landscape, but a closer look would tell the viewer that it is in fact something else. The photograph is actually composed of four buttocks from four different people, placed together in such a way that they would look like mountains at a glance. This is an creative way of viewing landscape and shapes that objects around around us can actually form. From this photograph, photographers’ ability to transform the way people view the world through photographs can be seen.