Alex Kreher: Bryan Derballa - Before we land

Bryan's photographs have such a sense of freedom, youth and peace but at the same time rebellious.
Seeing his series Before we land, I want to go down to the river and shoot photos of people hanging out on the rocks on Belle Isle in Richmond.
These photos are clearly well composed, have a great juxtaposition and are technically flawless but the main reason why I am drawn to these photos is the feeling I get from them. The closeness to nature, I can imagine the feel of the rocks on their skins, the sound of the water and the smell of the fresh, green leaves.
This series captures such an interesting moment of these young people. It might be after school or on a weekend day and you as a viewer don't want this moment to stop. But also from a long term perspective, you don't want these people in the photographs to grow up and eventually split paths and don't hang out on these rocks anymore.
It is very interesting how simple these photos are and yet they express such beautiful emotions.

Check out Bryan's website and more of his photos: http://bryanderballa.com/before-we-land

Taylor Stevenson: Zun Lee

Zun Lee  is a contemporary street photographer. Who uses light and color to emphasize the stories of his subjects. Majority of his work is done after the major event has transpired, capturing the moment at a unique time, the resolution. Each image tells a different story but is connected through Lee’s use of high contrasting edits. Also he captures multiple moments inside one shot. Lee stated, “The images often turn out to be self-portraits that have an undercurrent of self-discovery and identity exploration”, which helps to support my assumption of his work. Lee’s work is so inspiring because street photography captures a small snippet of the subjects life and by Lee being able to capture so much emotion and story really speaks for his eye. Lee waited for the perfect subjects and observed them so he would know what angle would tell there story.

Sarah Retchin--Oleksandr Hnatenko

Austrian photographer Hnatenko is best known for his surreal work. Though he is fairly young (born in 1986), he has quite an impressive portfolio.

He seems to mainly focus on surreal portraiture, and says that he finds those surreal moments born out of reality. They exist in his imagination and then take form in his photos. Based on his blog, it also seems like he is inspired by broad ideas and then eventually compacts each of them into one photograph. 

Allison Bills- Laura Ferreira

Laura Ferreira is a photographer and digital artist from Trinidad & Tobago. Her work almost always revolves around peoples as subject matter who perform consistent actions to create a high movement "snap" photo. It feels as if all her photos are frozen in time, while usually there are minute reference to movement i.e. hair, hands, etc. Her work is known for vibrant colors as well as undeniable reflections on the skin of all her subjects. Light source is never a question, considering the fact that it is always obvious where it comes from. Much work is done in photoshop, as well as making the subject matter interesting to photograph.

Jack Atley- Charlotte Laurance

Jack Atley is an Australian photographer who has an eclectic portfolio that includes portraits, advertising, commercial and corporate photography. Atley got his start at age 18 photographing for The Sydney Morning Herald.He is a former overall individual winner of The Australian Press Photographer of the Year Award, and in 2008 he was named as the runner up winner in Australia's richest Photographic/ Art Portraiture Award - The Moran Portraiture Prize. In 2010 he was listed as a top ten finalist in the Sony World Photography Competition (professional sports category).

http://www.jackatley.com/#!__main-page/vstc7=landscapes
http://www.jackatley.com/#!__main-page/vstc7=fashion
http://www.jackatley.com/#!__main-page/vstc7=portraits

Irving Penn: Jessica Aicholtz

Irving Penn was a very minimalistic photographer. His photographs of fashion and the famous were very influential throughout the 20th century. He was widely featured in Vogue magazine. He framed each of his photographs so that nothing escaped from the viewer unless he intended it to be that way. Penn is described as being a quiet, gentle man but with an intense perfectionism about him.

Along with his fashion photography, Penn was also well known for his immaculate still-life portraits. He loved to experiment in the darkroom in very untraditional ways. With a nude series of women, he bleached his prints so that their skins tones became harsh yet still very sexual. He printed much of his own work and enjoyed reprinting his earlier works with his newer discoveries in the darkroom.

Matthieu Gafsou - Liesa Collins

Foreword: As I was reading about this artist's work on his website, I noticed an interview excerpt from Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, a graduate student at VCU!

Matthieu Gafsou is a photographer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. For university education, he received a master's degree in history and film aesthetics, philosophy and literature and then went on to study photography at the School of Applied Arts in Vevey. In Gafsou's photography, he choses large scale objects to be his subjects, such as a play ground or a large building in construction. He plays on his interest of architecture and urbanism and shoots subjects relating to those topics. He has a very specific color scheme for each photograph and makes sure to have a reason for keeping everything within the frame.

Matthieu Gafsou, with his large format cameras, focuses a lot on urbanism and the way it affects certain cities. With the rise of all these tall buildings in the middle of destroyed towns, it leads the viewer to think about the cause and effect big ideas have on towns that just need help. I think what Gafsou was trying to get across is the difference between occupied space and busied space and how they can be received by the public in incorrect ways. 

Stephen Shore - Natalie Kohlhepp

            Stephen shore was destined to be a photographer from the very beginning it seems. Reading his Bio, I’ve found that he started dabbling in photography at age 6 and started selling work at age 14. As a young man he spent a lot of time around Andy Warhol, and started building his own style of candid, journalistic color photography based on the people and events surrounding him.

            Shore decided to go cross-country during the early 70s to photograph the American and Canadian landscapes. During his trip he realized that color photography would a more pertinent medium for this series, and settled on working at 8x10 format. In a way he brought color photography into the art world, proving that this medium was just as valid as other more formal mediums. I’m personally very attracted to his subject matter, his photographs always feel like a perfect in between moment.

Jeff Bridges: Shannon Roulet

                Jeff Bridges is one of my favorite actors so when I found out he dabbles in photography I was really excited to see his work. He was actually featured at the Candela gallery on Broad St. and it was awesome to see his photos in person. All of his pieces are shot on a Widelux film camera, which is a very temperamental camera from what I understand, and I think that’s what gives a lot of his photographs a loosely focused look. I also think that the wide angle of the shots lets him capture a lot of information, so when he chooses to focus on more singular subjects with the frame, it creates photos with depth.

               Almost all of his photos are taken on movie sets or traveling to and from movie sets/makeup trailers/etc. His subject matter varies from carefully composed shots of  elaborate sets, to behinds the scenes goofy faces of co-stars. A lot of his lighting comes from the lighting of the scene for the movie, so his shots are kind of like extreme wide-angle movie stills. I like his choice of black and white, wide-angled film, cause it definitely seems like a call back to classic film stocks and older cinema. 

www.jeffbridges.com/

Nan Goldin - Hannah Nees

Nan Goldin is an American photographer that shoots mainly with available light. Most often she presents her work in the form of a slideshow, being as long as 45 minutes with over 800 slides. When presenting these slideshows at film festivals, she uses a soundtrack to make the shows more of a narrative. When shooting, Goldin chooses to act as if she was invisible to her subjects to get a raw feeling in her photographs. One of the many types of cameras that she chooses to use is the Leica M6, a rangefinder film camera. Though, the work that made her known was not made from a Leica M6, but rather Nikon SLR's. In the 1970's and 80's, Goldin worked with Cibachrome prints (a dye destruction, positive to positive photographic process used for the reproduction of film transparencies).

When it comes to Goldin's themes, she focuses on examining gender, sex roles, and the politics that surround these issues. When she was younger, her first solo show was based around the experiences she had exploring the gay and transsexual communities in Boston. David Armstrong introduced Goldin to this community when she was in college, which ended up leading to her most well-known work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. This series of work focuses mainly on the use of heroin, violence, and aggressive couples. One interesting part about this series was that the majority of the subjects in these photos were dead by the 1990's (ten years later), due to AIDS or overdosing. Ever since the 1990's, Goldin has focused mainly on photographing New York skylines, babies, landscapes with people in water, and family life.

Website

Edgar Angelone- Lexi Wilson

Edgar Angelone is a fine art black and white photographer that uses photography as a unique expression of his human experiences. Edgar learned much of what he knows about photography from Kodak Manuals, the Ansel Adams Series, and local photo clubs, like many photographers of his generation. He uses a medium format camera and prints on platinum and gelatin silver traditional black and white prints. With their complex appearance and rich tonality, his photographs evoke emotions through feelings and impressions.

Much of Edgar's photographs capture themes that are occurring in his life at that particular time. He does not aim for his images to be thought of as pictoral, but instead stresses that his photographs focus on existence. Edgar is inspired by existential philosophers such as Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. His work often focuses on ideas of subjectivity and objectivity.

http://www.edgarangelone.com/

Cody Huff: Stanley Kubrick

Before Stanley Kubrick created his cinematic masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, or The Shining he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, a bi-weekly, Des Moines based publication. Kubrick worked on over 300 assignments for the magazine documenting different aspects of American life around the country. It’s clear from the visual beauty of his cinematic work that Kubrick had a grand understanding of the elements of photography. Kubrick’s early photographs show a great interest in one-point perspective and wide-angle shots. He builds incredibly captivating layers with every compositional element within the frame of his photographs, lessons that later served him in his film career.

Most of Kubrick’s published photographs were done while he was a photojournalist, but they are far more than just photos designed to document an assigned subject. Kubrick used these opportunities to explore the capabilities of photography. His photos, especially the Chicago series, make use of shadow and high contrast to create moods of mystery and intrigue. His angles, and understanding of perspective, draws in the viewer and makes the photos seem like they are about to burst into motion pictures. Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and his early years as a photographer certainly influenced his cinematic work. 

CHICAGO SERIES

NEW YORK SERIES

                         

W. Eugene Smith: Jessica Aicholtz

W. Eugene Smith is an influential black and white photographer. He is extremely dedicated to his work. Even after multiple times of being injured while photographing the front lines of the island-hopping American offensive against Japan during World War II, he recovered and continued his photography. A common theme of his work was social responsibility. Smith went headfirst into his work during the war. He wanted to capture the complete experience and "sink into the heart of the action". However, after a mortar wound he retired from his war photography and wanted to shoot something completely opposite of the war. The first photograph, "The Walk to Paradise Garden", exemplifies this. It is of his son and daughter walking through the woods into a clearing. This photograph became to be one of his most beloved.

 Smith strived to create work that touched the emotions and conscience of his audience. He learned photography from his mother. By his early teens he knew he was destined to be a photographer. By the early age of 21 he was already published in many magazines. But later on in his career he wanted to separate himself from the magazine industry and focus on being an independent artist.

Lee Jeffries - Hannah Nees

Lee Jeffries started out photographing sporting events near his hometown in Manchester, though switched to portrait photography after having met a homeless girl on the streets. One important factor about his work is that he does not like to talk about how he makes his images. In an interview, he spoke about understanding the need for one to be curious, but he would rather the viewers take the photographs as narratives. Though, I found that Jeffries uses a Canon EOS 5D, messing around with extremely low aperture settings as well as ISO settings on the lower end of the spectrum. One of the other more important parts of how he gets the extreme contrast in his images is by using Adobe Photoshop.

Jeffries likes to focus on capturing emotion with his dark images. From the same interview reference above, I found that underneath the simplicity of portrait photography is the need for him to "take their likeness and instill a greater meaning."Jeffries is considered a street photographer and uses his passion for finding emotion to take pictures of the homeless. Though he has shot portraits for people other than the homeless, the homeless is the basis of most of his photography. If there was a theme for his work, I would say it to be "finding emotion within the homeless".

Sarah Retchin--Daidō Moriyama

Moriyama is a Japanese photographer best known for his photos depicting post-war Japan and beyond. His work is characterized by powerful, high contrast black-and-white pictures, concentrating on the little-seen parts of the city and highlighting the effects of industrialization on modern life in Japan.

As a street photographer, his goal is to provoke the viewer to discover a new language. He believes that photography isn’t conclusive the way language is, and communicates what he sees in the world through his photos rather than through text. He mainly shoots in black and white, and most of his work has an aggressive, high contrast, dynamic, angular feel to it. There’s a fierce motion in his photos, some blurring to abstraction, yet with the need to capture the immediacy and vivacity of living presence at the same time.