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.
Here are some of my best images from my shoot at Jersey zoo, from these I found that they were appropriate to remove the main subject of each photograph (such as butterflies and flowers) and impose them upon white backgrounds, which would make it much easier for me to incorporate them into my editing process. Below is each of those images followed by the cut out version of it.
The main thing which I have got out of this shoot and my favourite images is a range of natural beauty from patterns and colours to shaped and forms which I can use in my photo montage process. The butterflies specifically are a common occurrence in the photo montage work from artists which I researched to begin the project.
I also then made an edit from one of the images which i took in this shoot. It is a completely experimental edit in which I created a wallpaper-like pattern from one of the butterfly images, I just wanted to include it in this post in order to show the possibilities of what can be done with simple editing of these images…
This blog post shows my photo-shoot in which I planned to visit Jersey zoo to photograph the butterflies in the new enclosure. This is because through my research I found that butterflies were a commonly feature element of the artwork which I was looking at such as Peter Blake, Dexter Navy, Damien Hirst and Dan Baldwin. Although I was unsure of why butterflies were used in this work I believe that they are an example of nature’s beauty and when added to a piece their prints and patterns give for a very aesthetically pleasing effect, so therefore I wanted to incorporate this in my work. Whilst on my photo-shoot I made the most of the location and photographed some of the other animals which I may also use in some of my photo-montages. I believe that this shoot was successful and has lead to plenty of images which I am sure I will use in my work for this project.
Throwing a dodgeball in the air and creating a line with tennis balls
The process I went through to create this image started with open three different images and then colour balancing them with red and yellow.
One in shadows
Another in Midtones
And the last one in highlights
I then placed the three picture stacked on each other prepped for the fade tool so that all three could be seen
I used a fade of 35% on the shadow and midtone pictures so that the highlight photo could be seen underneath.
After that I went into brightness and contrast and reduced brightness by 25% and boosted contrast by 100
Then too make a final touch I went into Vibrance and reduced vibrance by 100% and boosted saturation by 50% so that it created a burnt out colour effect.
Winter Beacon, 1998 watercolour on paper David Prentice
These two artists, David Prentice, and Hiroshi Sugimoto have a clear connection that can be linked through their work by the abstract approach to the landscapes. There is also the absence of man-made structures this, therefore, gives their work a lack of identity without the context of where the landscape is.
However, there is a strong contrast between the two artists. Prentice paints in a wide range and variety of colour. These colours are bright and portray the landscape and exciting and inviting, whereas Sugimoto uses more greyscale tones in his photographs and instead of colour, his focus is on the lighting, texture, and technique in his images.
Lorna Simpson is an American Photographer born in Brooklyn in 1960. She is known for creating bold works of African American women and sometimes African American men, questioning conventional notions of race and identity. In ‘Five Day Forecast’the images shows an African american woman. The images has been cropped so that the face is not visible in the image meaning the viewer only see the torso of the women. From a quick glance the images all look identical but after looking each image is different in the way she has her arms crossed, clothing and overall positioning. The photos appear underneath five contiguous frames, labeled above with the days of the workweek, Monday to Friday in a sort of calendar or weather forecast format. Underneath the image is ten plaques two for each image, which read misdescription, misinformation, misidentify, misdiagnose, misfunction, mistranscribe, misremember, misgauge, misconstrue, and mistranslate.
Simpson said ” I use the figure to examine the ways in which gender and culture shape the interactions, relationships and experiences of our lives in contemporary America.” and that she was exploring what could happen to a Black women within one week.
John Baldessari was a key figure in the Conceptual art movement that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing ideas, language, and performative actions over the formal preoccupations of painting.
. In his black and white video, I am Making Art, made in 1971, Baldessari takes a humorous and ironic look at the extremes of such a position. This work is an example of post-modernism art, this movement was coined in the mid to late 1900’s, it is a reaction against modernism; a movement that was based on idealism and achieving a Utopian vision, modernist artists wanted to reflect the real world through what they create. Post-modernism denied the idea that there is any single way or definition of what art should be, viewers have their own interpretation of the art due to their own unique experiences. Another aspect of post-modernism is that it takes pieces of different past styles. I am Making Art is post-modern in the way that Baldesarri has created something that everyone interprets differently and especially in the way that he is aware of this
Contact Sheet For ‘Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line’
In 1970, Baldessari and some friends burnt all of the paintings he had created between 1953 and 1966 as part of a new piece, titled The Cremation Project. The ashes from these paintings were baked into cookies resulting in an art installation consisting of a bronze plaque with the destroyed paintings’ birth and death dates, as well as the recipe for making the cookies. Through this project, Baldessari draws a connection between artistic practice and the human life cycle. For me this project brings to life his quote of ‘no more bboring art’, as the idea does sound very boring at first as it it an active that you seen being done every way, but I do think that the images are actually very interesting to look at.
This shoot was as a response to John Baldessari and the way in which he tries to make his art fun and “not boring”. As a class we were set a variety of photography games resulting in a fun activity which then led to some interesting photos. The first game was ‘photography boxing’ where the allocated model has to try and dodge the camera and the cameraman has to try and photograph them whilst they’re dodging. The second game was a simple one where your partner through a ball and you had to try and photograph it in mid air. Following on from this, we then had to try and capture a line of three tennis balls in the air inspired by a shoot that Baldessari had completed.
My Edits
I like the abstract nature of the images with the balls and the obscure nature that they create. Although tennis balls and bouncy balls are not that uncommon, it is rather uncommon for them to be photographed in isolation. Thus creating a new but interesting subject matter for the audience. I was much more satisfied with how the ‘dodging’ game resulted in unique portraits than the ball ones. When editing, i chose to put all of the images in black and white as I believe it was somewhat distracting. Also, with the white wall, this effect complimented it. It is often hard to get a model to pose for you within a portrait shoot, however this game made it significantly easier to achieve successful portraits in my opinion. This is because there is no awkwardness within the model as they were more focused on the dodging than posing for the camera.
