This week’s discussion post was a 2001 profile of Sally Mann. Mann is a photographer who lives in rural Virginia. The works shown in the video are mostly of her nude children and surrounding countryside. The video does start with Mann taking pictures of dog bones in black and white. In comparing Mann’s work to our text and the section on the birth of photography, the closest I could come to describing her work would be portrait photography. She uses black and white film along with development techniques to bring out contrasts between her children’s skin and objects around them. In particular, the picture of her daughter with the hair stands on her chest is a great way to use contrast to see a difference between the hair and the
Despite of the difficulty, Maloof searched and looked for all people who were possibly connected to Vivian Maier. The focus of the documentary film revolved around the journey and the quest of John Maloof in discovering more about the woman who has an extraordinary gift in taking exemplary photographs. The film is mostly devoted to interviews and testimonials from different people who had connections with Maier’s life, mostly the children who grew up in Maier’s care, and from the two contemporary masters, Joel Meyerwitz and Mary Ellen Mark. Vivian Maier was mostly remembered as a tall, awkward, and oddly-dressed nanny in New York and Chicago.
As a part of the celebration in 1993 of the universal declaration of Human rights, her print out back was selected by international historians as one of 30 paintings and sculptures for reproduction on a stamp representing an article of the declaration.
On January 31, 2001 Logan Marr was found dead in an unfinished basement, yards of duct tape surrounding her, and a foster mother claiming that she just fell and hit her head. Sally Schofield, a respected caseworker at Maine's Department of Health and Human Services, had taken Logan in 2000. By 2001, 5 year old Logan would be dead. “I just want Sally Schofield out of my life forever,” Logan’s mother says, 16 years later, “She’s ruined my children’s lives and mine. She took an innocent child from this world for no reason.” Logan’s death was a tragedy that highlighted the problems in Maine's child welfare systems. The mistakes that were made were unforgivable, but a lesson learned from DHHS.
For my term paper I decided to go to the Cantor Museum in Palo Alto, and I chose to focus on two portraits of women from two distinct time periods. First, I decided on the portrait of Margaret Blagge, Wife of Sidney, 1st Earl of Godolphin. This portrait was painted by the artist Matthew Dixon in 1675, in the Baroque period of art. The portrait of Margaret Blagge was done in England, and it was painted as an oil on canvas. The second artwork I chose to compare was the Portrait of Sally Fairchild by John Singer Sargent. This portrait was done from the year 1884 to 1887 during the Realism movement in art. The portrait of Sally Fairchild was painted in the United States of America, and was painted as an oil on canvas. When comparing these two portraits
A variety of her works in the late 1970’s were called “Untitled Film Stills.” These were portraits of Sherman playing “stereotypical woman roles” in the 1960’s and 1950’s. Although, these were not self-portraits,
Caitlyn Hatch is a twenty year old student from Amherst, Massachusetts, who spends her weekends roaming abandoned buildings all over the western part of the state. What she does in these buildings is take photographs, however, she has not always been interested in the medium. Photography had never been her first choice for what she would possibly study at university, and she never imagined it as being something she would want to pursue professionally. Originally, she was intent on being a graphic designer. She had begun to play around with an online photoshop app, editing pictures taken by other people and was sure graphic design was for her, that is, until she got her first camera. She got her first camera at age fourteen for Christmas, one of the big black Nikon digital cameras. While she had never seriously considered photography before, she began to play around with her new camera. The novelty of it all coupled with the support of her father, who himself was an amateur nature photographer throughout his twenties, started the fire in her to take up this art and learn as much about it as she could.
Catherine Angel’s Bessie and Nadine (2000) is a toned gelatin silver print on paper. The photographer, Catherine Angel, is currently a professor for the Department of Art at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, but most importantly, she is a mother. In fact, her daughters are the subjects shown in this photograph. Catherine Angel is experienced in Black and White Large Format Photography, Mixed Media Collage, Handmade Books and Color works. Her work has been exhibited in more than 400 exhibits. In this black and white photograph, Bessie and Nadine, there are two young girls of color are interlocked in fetal position within a dirt hole in the ground. There is grass on the rim of the photograph and a scarce amount of living plants around this
Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly into outer space. She was born on May 26th, 1951 in Los Angeles, California and she passed away July 23, 2012 at the age of 61 (Dunbar, 2014). Sally attended and graduated from Westlake High School in Los Angeles, California, in 1968. While Sally was in high school, her dream was to be a professional tennis player, however soon after graduating she took her success to Stanford University. Sally graduated from Stanford University with bachelor’s degrees in both Physics and English in 1973. She then continued her education at Stanford by earning her master's degree and Ph.D in Physics by 1978. Sally was loved and missed by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy, who is an American Children’s
This article introduces historical accounts and analysis of programs for incarcerated mothers and their children in the United States (Susan C. Craig, 2009).
The article, “Looking at Women” by Scott Russell Sanders published in The Norton Reader, 13th edition, embarks on a journey to find out why men look at women. Sanders starts off with his personal encounter as adolescence were he was told not to look at women out of lustful desire, because women would not want to be stared at like that. He also wondered from his early college days, were his bunkmate had pictures of nude women and he and others would endlessly stir at these pictures. Sanders questions whether women enjoy being looked at by men and how should men look at women. He uses quotes from people and facts to find answers to these questions. He also analyses the problem from global perspective. He wonders why women try so hard to look good. He concludes with the fact that women like looking good, but they sometimes don't like it when men stare at them. Sanders opines in his thesis that " to be turned into an object – whether by the brush of a painter or the lens of a photographer or the eye of a voyeur, whether by hunger or poverty or enslavement, by mugging or rape, bullets or bombs, by hatred, racism, car crashes, fires, or falls – is for each of us the deepest dread; and to reduce another person to an object is the primal wrong” (188).
Sally Mann photographs the things that she is closest to. “The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best, unless you photograph what you love, you’re
No other artist has ever made as extended or complex career of presenting herself to the camera as has Cindy Sherman. Yet, while all of her photographs are taken of Cindy Sherman, it is impossible to class call her works self-portraits. She has transformed and staged herself into as unnamed actresses in undefined B movies, make-believe television characters, pretend porn stars, undifferentiated young women in ambivalent emotional states, fashion mannequins, monsters form fairly tales and those which she has created, bodies with deformities, and numbers of grotesqueries. Her work as been praised and embraced by both feminist political groups and apolitical mainstream art. Essentially, Sherman's photography is part of the culture and
Sally Mann’s style incorporates black and white photographs of her children, which are presented with “ordinary moments of childhood, suspended in time and transformed into aesthetic objects, takes on a distorted, even uncanny quality” (Arnason and Mansfield 719). Sally Mann photographed The New Mothers in 1989. This photograph’s most dominant elements are value and space. Having the photographs black and white really enhances the visibility of values. Most of Mann’s work is outside and has a define depth of field to blur out the background and emphasize the focus of the children. This compositional style helps to identify the high and low key values within the photos. The clothes, the reflection of the sun on the girls’ hair, and the girls fair skin are the part of the image that show high-key values, while the rest of the photo in more middle and low-key values. The intense depth of field increases a feeling of space for the viewer. In the photo you can see that the two young girls and their stroller is all in a line horizontally. Behind the girls you can notice they are outside in a open area because of the blurred grass and trees behind them. This photograph’s most dominant principles are movement and variety. The depth of field and lack of distraction in the background of the photo allows your eye to focus and move around with the subjects in the photo. The height of the subjects forms a triangle shape, which is
The characters Sherman portrays, lighting, clothing and expressions are cliché of what is present in cinema, so much that viewers of her work have told Sherman that they ‘remember the movie’ that the image is derived from, yet Sherman having no film in mind at all.[iv] Thus showing that her word has a pastiche of past cinematic genres, and how women are portrayed in cinema and photography and how Sherman has manipulated the ‘male gaze’ around her images so they become ironic and cliché.
Henry Peach Robinson, born on July 9th, 1830, was a British photographer and prominent author on photography. Known as “the King of Photographic Picture Making,” he began his life’s work as a painter but would become one of the most influential photographers of the late 19th century. He was a prolific advocate for photography as an art form and is well known for his role in “pictorialism,” which, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is “an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality.”