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Stephen Shore was born in 1947 in New York. He was an only child and lived a privileged existence. With annual trips around Europe, exposing him to new cultures and art. At the age of six, his uncle gifted him a darkroom set. He would use this to develop his families snapshots taken on a inexpensive Kodak Brownie. He had little skills with a real camera until the age of nine, when his mother bought him a 35mm camera.

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Shore was using a large format camera (8-by-10 camera, that’s on a tripod, and it produces a negative that’s eight inches by ten inches. ) to ensure maximum exposure and detail.

This photograph of an intersection in Oklahoma is among the image sequence known as American Surfaces, taken on Shore’s first drive across the United States. At the center of the image is the point where two roads intersect, marked by a set of traffic lights and a vertical sign marking the Texaco station visible behind two cars on the right side of the image. The image has been taken late in the day and the lights are bright against the faded blue and orange sky, the dark green of the nature strips and the grey of the road and the foreground parking lot in which crumpled newspapers lie discarded. American Surfaces is intended to be seen as a sequence, in which the minor details of life on the road, including food on tables, beds and televisions in motels and gas stations such as this, build to communicate a sense of the North American interior as an anonymous monotony.

Another task we performed on our out of classroom day was experimenting with archival images. In our pairs we were given two images between us, we then flipped a coin onto said image and cut around the coin with a Stanley knife. We then changed the outcome of the images by overlapping them in different formations. We also kept the off cuts to add to the images we had experimented with. Below are some different variations of the images we experimented with in my pair.

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.

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.

Dodging the Camera

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Throwing a dodgeball in the air and creating a line with tennis balls

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The process I went through to create this image started with open three different images and then colour balancing them with red and yellow.

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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.

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.