Miscellaneous photos - same sex

I was searching for gay families and came up with two photographers who I quite liked - Gigi Kaeser and the other on the Creatas stock photo website (name unknown). There were also some I clipped from a you tube site. However although I like them, this is not what I am looking for. This is more portrait.

EDDIE ADAMS - photographer

Eddie Adams – photographer

Eddie Adams is a world famous documentary photographer and in particular war photojournalist with many single photographs which have become icons representing particular times in war. His many awards include a Pultzer prize – he is said to have over 500 prizes under his belt. For many years he worked with Time and with the US Associated Press.

The reason I am including him in my research is because I like his style of action in black and white. It has a great impact. There is a lot of emotion in most of his shots and they tell a story. I have included two of his best know photographs here.

He is quoted as saying:

If it makes you laugh

If it makes you cry,

If it rips your heart,

That’s a good picture

References:

http://www.cah.utexas.edu/collections/photojournalists/adams.php

http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=440&name=Adams,Eddie

BRENDA ANN KENNEALEY - photographer

Brenda Ann Kennealey – photographer

Brenda Ann Kennealey is a freelance documentary photographer working in the States. A lot of her work concentrates on drug abuse and the people who have really tough lives for one reason or another. She has also ventured further into video work.

She has been won many awards including POY international (Picture of the year international). Her photos tell a story and are quite disturbing.

I like her style of photography because it is raw and because they are action family shots. However when I photograph my families these are not families which have drug problems or ones with too many children for the mum to cope. Hopefully they are happy families with a little chaos in their homely lives.

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46LFxU8_-k0

http://www.poyi.org/63/caa/first_39.php

STEFAN JORA - photographer

Stefan Jora – Photographer

Stefan Jora is a self taught San Francisco based photographer. His only ‘formal’ photographic education was a Missouri photojournalism workshop and the Eddie Adams workshop in 2007. The great Eddie Adams! what else would you need for photojournalism!

He specialises in photojournalism involving culture and gender identity issues within social groups in the US.

I very much like his documentary style and is is quite Eddie Adam like except he is doing it in colour. I shall document Eddie Adams later. I hope to do my shots something like these.

He is doing a Gay Families Project in the US.

These are some of his other work:

Reference:

http://stefanjora.com/index.php

http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com/usr/usr-show?U_ID=U0000mmnIpSDvh.k

TINA FIVEASH - photographer

Tina Fiveash – photographer

Tina Fiveash is an Australian photographer. Originally from Canberra where she studied at the Canberra School of Arts, she has now moved to Sydney where she works as a freelance photographer. She has had a number of exhibitions and these are often on gender issues and is known to put her subjects in the 50s era with lots of colour.

Her images stand out – they are thought provoking and often relate back to her teenage years when she desperately wanted to be a boy. This at the time led to depression and anxiety. When I look at her images and see the colour and brightness of them, I see happiness and that she has come to terms with her sexuality.

References:

http://tinafiveash.com.au/

http://www.gendercentre.org.au/57article6.htm

LANDSCAPES - Thoughts from DAVID BATE

LANDSCAPES – THOUGHTS FROM DAVID BATE

David Bate has written a very comprehensive book called ‘The Key Concepts’ about many aspects of photography, tracing its history regarding the photographic genres such as portraits, landscaped, still life, documentary, art and so on. In this essay I shall be looking at landscapes in terms of its history, the types and the compositions.

Landscapes viewed as a picture dates back long before photography to religious paintings but popular landscape images emerged commercially with postcards – an early form of tourism in the early 19^th century. There are postcards still today but commercially good looking landscapes are what the tourism industry survives on. It has also many other commercial uses such as architectural planning and urban planning.

Landscapes are defined by Bates as the geography or visual mapping of a space. What he says is: ‘ So what is important here is the specificity of what landscape views bring as images to social knowledge and what photography contributes to this field of vision’. I thought to myself – ‘what is he talking about’. Having never not been aware of landscape images it is difficult to imagine to be confronted with painting of an area with trees and sky or an early photograph of similar in a not-very-sharp black and white photo – having never seen one before. What is it? What is a landscape image?

Bates says it is a type of vision in a picture. Of the early photographs, John Ruskin thought the mechanism of the photo spoilt the vision of a landscape. It was crude and lacked subtlety.

But before photographs came into the picture (for want of a better word), we need to look at the popular landscape paintings of the early 19^th century. The English who travelled to Italy returned home with paintings of the Italian landscape. These were not exact paintings of one area, but more like a composite of the good parts of several areas, so the outcome, a composite, was a little unreal but picturesque – ie like a picture. This is a word that became popular in describing a pleasing-to-the-eye painting (or later, photograph).

Actually composite paintings date back to Claude Lorrain (mid 1600s) where he made ‘virtual landscapes’ from several places – these being biblical. But in this essay I am looking at is when landscapes became popular and as I mentioned earlier that was with the advent of painted postcards.

An interesting outcome of these picturesque landscape paintings was that the English tried to make their gardens like a painting. Landscape gardeners became known as artists because they sculptured gardens as complicated walks involving different areas that would invoke different feelings to the observer. These were feelings of happiness, peace etc.

There are two words commonly used historically to describe landscape paintings – picturesque and sublime. The word picturesque is what I have mentioned above regarding the gardens – these landscapes evoke feelings – good feelings. When we look at the paintings of the 19^th century we see things like trees and grass, leaves and fields, a desert, the sea and so on, they gives us feelings, but these feelings might be different in different observers.

So if picturesque gives us good feelings (some call it a ‘beauty spot)’, then sublime means the opposite (sometimes called the ‘bad spot’). Edmund Blake describes the difference between beauty and sublime. The beauty landscapes are what the tourist industry want to promote to tourists. Sublime is associated with danger, fear and anger – the black spot place. This could be an image of a scary looking tree in the dark or it could be a stormy night or rough seas. Even a cityscape might give us feelings of potential danger. At the extreme end of this sublime image is for instance, war landscapes. However the military might somehow have a war image that is positive or picturesque one which is used for marketing – hero men in the war field.

Confusing – yes it is. What is picturesque in one scene is sublime in another.

* * *

Relating back these two modes of picturesque and sublime to photographs throws in another confusing issue. Photographs are meant to be truthful; ‘pure fact’, so lets look at the four periods of photography between 1825 and 1935 – experimental, factual, pictorial and new photography (which some say is a return to straight photography).

While the experimental photography is pretty straight forward, it was noted that depending on the angle of factual images, one might get a different meaning; a different feeling for instance of a photograph of a beach with no one on it could be read as peaceful whereas perhaps behind the photographer there might be an ugly mineshaft. Selective photographing is not always factual.

Bate looks at a photograph of the pyramids in Egypt by Francis Frith taken in 1862. Frith was of the view that photographs should be neither picturesque nor sublime – that they should be factual and realistic.

The work ‘pictorial’ in this sense of the period relates to things like a hard or soft focus or perhaps just making a landscape look like a beautiful painting.

Getting back to the commercial used of landscape photographs, they can provide information about the land whether scientific, geographical or even political. Are these always fact though?

* * *

Bate then turns to discuss composition. He says: ‘a conventional good composition is keeping the eye of the spectator within the frame’.

So whatever is photographed it could be classed as picturesque if it is well composed. In fact something ugly could be seen as beautiful if composed well. Si is that picturesque or sublime?

One feeling common in many photographs is the feeling of melancholia – there is something in the subject matter that reminds the viewer of something in the past. This can be good or bad emotions.

There is pleasure derived from a well composed photograph. It gives harmony and balance; it’s organised and maintains excitement – the eye recognises order and likes it.

Alternatively, a badly composed image is not ordered and the viewer becomes disinterested.

When someone says ‘this is my sort of picture’, they identify themselves with the organisation of the scene. But what are they viewing? Bates talks about the ‘grip of emotional effect’ – meaning can we stop having a pleasurable effect from an image if it is just truthful? Some photos can be pleasurable to some while senseless and grotesque to others. Perhaps some ‘grotesque’ photographs might be unsettling but are well proportioned – good photos and are liked.

Proportion and symmetry might keep the eye of the viewer within the frame whether the subject matter provokes good or bad emotions. Bate brings in the example of a painting depicting workers toiling in a field – doing work that perhaps the viewer would not consider doing, but it is liked & creates good feelings because as well as being a factual representation, it is well composed.

When looking at photographs, Bate says of sublime: ‘as for the sublime, the relation of composition is clearly one of testing the capacity of the ego to tolerate excitement’. While you can sense outrage in a picturesque image, with a sublime image, you can feel pain and outrage etc as well.

Edward Burke writes that something beautiful is social and something sublime is anti-social. Bates adds that we shouldn’t oversimplify the words picturesque and sublime as good and bad because it depends on many issues. Here he looks at a chocolate box image of the Swiss Alps – the perfect image – picturesque, then as he looks closely he seen human figures in the foreground – they are on a track and this beautiful bit of perfect nature is not perfect at all.

Good composition satisfies the observer even if the image is distasteful i.e. there is some sort of satisfaction and therefore the feeling is that it is 'beautiful' or 'picturesque'.

The whole landscape of looking at landscapes is more complicated than meets the eye!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!

References:

Bate, David; Photography: The Key Concepts

http://pymd.com/

MURRAY FREDERICKS - Photographer

MURRAY FREDERICKS – Photographer

Murray Fredericks is the photographer who has travelled into Australia’s heartland year after year for the isolation and for the love of photographing Lake Eyre. His images culminated in the making of a documentary film called ‘Salt’.

Fredericks method of transport when he travels is a three-wheeler-bike with all his photographic and tent equipment attached. He ventures alone into the emptiness of this desolate area.

His photographs show the vastness of Lake Eyre, its flatness and very often he photographs his camp set-up alone in the desert. They are very simple photographs – often sky, a straight horizon and a white or light coloured foreground. They have a magic about them.

The film ‘Salt’ captures the remoteness. It has interwoven Frederick’s still photographs with film clips. It shows how he might set up a photograph – for instance he might walk half a km to where he wants to leave his gear in thick mud, then he retraces those same steps to get back to the camera but leave no footsteps between the set up and the camera. The still photo would be of a long trail coming from behind the stuck-in-the-mud bike and also the bike stuck, but no footprints to where the photo is shot. Very exhausting. I wonder whether he ever questions what happens if he cant get his bike out again?

His photographic results are amazing