David Benjamin Sherry is an American photographer who was born in Woodstock, New York, on the 14th of January, 1981, he is now based in Los Angeles. Majority of his work is large format film photography, of which he focuses on landscapes and portraits.
He went to the the Rhode Island School of Design and received his BFA in photography in 2003 and then went to Yale University and got his MFA in photography in 2007.
Most of his Landscapes don’t include modern or urban structures, but they all have a sense of bare landscape, which is something to do with the desert, rocky lands he photographs.
The signature trait of his work is the colours that are overlaid on top of his images that make them seem other worldly.
His work has been exhibited in places such as New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, Berlin, London and Aspen.
John Baldessari – “I think when I’m doing art, I’m questioning how to do it.”
John Baldessari is a leading Conceptual artist. In the early 1960s, when he emerged, painting was important in his work. He painted in a gestural style but by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce pre-existing images and text often creating riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting and in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and instead made a large range of media (his interests generally still focused on the photographic image.)
Baldessari once said – “If you can’t see their face, you’re going to look at how they’re dressed, maybe their stance, their surroundings,”
We spend a lesson outside the classroom to do a an outdoor photo shoot task. In the lesson when started out in pairs throwing these yellow dodge balls up in the air and trying to frame and photograph them with no blur in the center of the view finder. The point of this task was to try and teach as how to photograph a moving object while ensuring the subject was framed correctly.
We then moved on to ‘Photo Boxing’. In this task we used a small portraiture lens on our cameras and tried to photograph our partner who was consistency moving around. This tasked also focused on moving objects and trying to capture them without motion blur.
John Baldessari’s image
This is an edit I created in the style of the original image were I used the paint brush tool to recreate the sky the same colour. I then cropped out the balls from my original image, turned then orange in colour and positioned them as i thought they should be.
In our final task we tried to recreate Baldessari’s image of three oranges in a straight line. He took the image by change after throwing the three oranges up in the air and capturing them in a line by chance. We tried to recreate this by our partner throwing up three tennis balls. I also created created a more abstract edit to experiment with the idea.
I have chosen to research John Baldessari because I like the style he edits and experiments with his photographs, I hope to incorporate factors of Baldessari into my own project.
John Baldessari, born June 17, 1931, is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California. His work influenced; Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Annette Lemieux and Barbra Kruger among others.
Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960’s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S and Europe.
Image Analysis
I have chosen this photograph of John Baldessari’s because the dots he uses on the faces of the subjects in his photographs is something that I want to incorporate into my project and experiment with within photoshoot three. I like John Baldessari’s style of putting dots over the faces of people in his photographs because I feel like this does a good job of creating mystery and adding something more interesting to what normally would be a dull photograph. This photograph specifically is one of my favourites because I like the use of only two colours, black and yellow, and the high contrast between the two and also the contrast against the actual black and white photograph, the yellow dot is an eye-catching factor against the rest of the black and white. In conclusion this photograph is simple but has eye-catching factors that make it great and I hope to incorporate this style into my own project.
