Environmental PortraitureStudent PowerPoints.

Cindy Sherman

Portrait photography

Biography

Source of information :http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1170

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

Bringing together more than 170 photographs, this retrospective survey traces the artist’s career from the mid 1970s to the present. Highlighted in the exhibition are in-depth presentations of her key series, including the groundbreaking series "Untitled Film Stills" (1977–80), the black-and-white pictures that feature the artist in stereotypical female roles inspired by 1950s and 1960s Hollywood, film noir, and European art-house films; her ornate history portraits (1989–90), in which the artist poses as aristocrats, clergymen, and milkmaids in the manner of old master paintings; and her larger-than-life society portraits (2008) that address the experience and representation of aging in the context of contemporary obsessions with youth and status. The exhibition will explore dominant themes throughout Sherman’s career, including artifice and fiction; cinema and performance; horror and the grotesque; myth, carnival, and fairy tale; and gender and class identity. Also included are Sherman’s recent photographic murals (2010), which will have their American premiere at MoMA.

She tacks pictures of herself mainly dressed up in various characters. This picture is centered, with a outside background.

To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist and wardrobe mistress and has hitherto deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters from siren to clown to aging socialite.

the black-and-white stills from unmade film noir productions in which Sherman played assorted vamps, imperilled victims and femmes fatales. Other rooms contained the macabre sex pictures in which amputated dolls and dildos take the place of humans; the vomit and shit-splattered still lifes; "fashion shoots" where clothes and people seem conspicuous by their absence; a selection of sad-sack beauty queens and bit-part actors; riffs on art history and portraiture; and finally Sherman's 2008 images of rich society ladies, each with surgery scars and wrinkles visible under the couture gowns and heavy foundation – perhaps a metaphor for the structural cracks that precipitated the financial crash.

Diane Arbus

BiographyPhotographer. Born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, in New York, New York. Diane Arbus was one of the most distinctive photographers in the twentieth century, known for her eerie portraits and offbeat subjects. Her artistic talents emerged at a young age; she was created interesting drawings and paintings while in high school. She married Allan Arbus in 1941 who taught her photography.

Working with her husband, Diane Arbus started out in advertising and fashion photography. They became quite a successful team with photographs appearing in such magazines as Vogue. In the late 1950s, she began to focus on her own photography. To further her art, Arbus studied with photographer Lisette Model around this time. She began to pursue taking photographs of people she found during her wanderings around New York City. She visited seedy hotels, public parks, a morgue, and other various locales. These unusual images had a raw quality and several of them found their way in the July 1960 issue of Esquire magazine. These photographs were a spring board for more work for Arbus.

By the mid-1960s, Diane Arbus was a well-established photographer, participating in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York among other places. She was known for going to great lengths to get the shots she wanted. She became friends with many other famous photographers, such as Richard Avedon and Walker Evans.

While professionally Arbus continued to thrive in the late 1960s, she had some personal challenges. Her marriage ended in 1969, and she later struggled with depression. She committed suicide in her New York apartment on July 26, 1971. Her work remains a subject of intense interest, and her life was part of the basis of the 2006 film, Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus.

Photographers Style• Her style is voyeuristic, she photographs strange people in normal

environments. All her photos are square

The use of the flash in daylight on the streets was crucial to her photographs. She wanted to avoid the situation where faces became dark because the background behind them was lighter. By using the flash Arbus did not have to manipulate people who were backlit by turning them towards the sun light but instead could get them unblinking in the position they were.

Equipment she used

Diane Arbus often shot her images with a Rolleiflex medium format twin lens reflex that provided a square aspect ratio and wait level viewfinder. This allowed her to connect with subjects in ways that a standard eye level viewfinder did not.

The photo shows a boy with his shoulder strap hanging off awkwardly, as well as this he is tensing his hands while holding a toy grenade and pulling a strange creepy face.

This is a photo of identical twins standing side by side in matching corduroy dresses. One is slightly smiling and the other is slightly frowning which creates some diversity in the picture.

This photo was part of her Untitled Series and were taken at the residences for the mentally ill between 1969 and 1971. This is a photo of a girl with Downs Syndrome. The majority of the untitled series remained unpublished.

Tips and Inspiration• Diana Arbus has taught us that you should connect with your subjects and

don’t to photograph people that do look different. • For example this image:- You would not normally Photograph this as some people believe it is controversial

You should always go places that you have never been, as you are more likely to find something interesting to photograph.Your subjects are more important than the photos you are taking, without the subjects being who you are there will not be an interesting part of the photograph.

Dryden Goodwin

Biography

Dryden Goodwin is a British artist and photographer, born in 1971, Bournemouth.

His work ranges from video and photography, to sculpture and installation. Dryden combines draw in to his images to explore the changing nature of our contact with people in public spaces and helps raise the issues associated with surveillance.

The photographers’ Gallery, London co-commissioned Dryden to produce a body of work in and around Soho, London, resulting in an exhibition and a substantial publication in late 2008.

He took photographs of passers-by and blew them up large, scratching a series of lines across their faces.

He used portraits of friends and family, overlaying pose to create images of fluctuation intensity.

These larger scale photographs are the first in an on-going series sharing the method of tracing the face and head with a compass with the smaller scale Capture (2001) series. The Cradle series presents these individuals in life-size proportions.

‘William’

Eve Arnold Cassie and Jack

Biography

• Eve Arnold was born Eve Cohen on April 21 1912 in Philadelphia, one of nine children. Her parents were Russian Jews who had fled persecution. Although her father was a rabbi and well-educated, he could find work only as a pedlar, and Eve grew up in poverty.

• Throughout her long career Eve Arnold’s pictures were always marked by understanding and compassion. She never strove for effect, and in the 1950s revelled in the advantages the new reportage had over studio-bound photographers. It allowed her to show celebrities in spontaneous mood, and to achieve unusual levels of intimacy and trust with her subjects, especially women.

Iconic image

Image Analysis

• Haiti 1954

The image has tone and an emotional property because Eve Arnold used levels of trust to achieve a component of intimacy in her photographs which has been her technique throughout her career including candid celebrity photography gaining the trust of Hollywoods finest such as Marilyn Monroe.

Image Analysis

This is a candid photograph of Marilyn Monroe, the image contains various colors and texture as well as geometrical line. This captures what she may look like as she is having some time to herself and an insight in to the sort of thing she enjoyed.

Image Analysis

This is a controversial photo taken in Virginia 1958 where black and white children are introduced in schools for the first time at the opening of new mixed schools. The photograph is iconic as well as interesting showing the tension between the two subjects creating the viewer to feel awkward.

Style of the Photographer

• Arnold increasingly alternated between colour features on people's daily lives and glamorous silver screen portraits.

• Eve Arnold was a single-minded and determined documentary photographer, and a portraitist who won the trust of her famous subjects.

• Although she worked for all the great colour picture magazines, then in their heyday, her preference stayed with black-and-white.

• Visual examples would be the many shots that she has done of Marilyn Monroe and other famous figure

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold

Tips and Inspiration

Tips

• Become close with the subject so that you can capture a more intimate image

• Record the essence of the subject

• Develop themes extensively so you have more to work with

Inspiration

• The soft black and white tone of images

• Becoming close with the subject to capture mood

• Don’t pose all the images because then you capture subjects at their most relaxed

Julia Margaret Cameron

Iconic Images

Biography on Margaret CameronJulia Margaret Cameron (June 11, 1815 – January 26, 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for Arthurian and similar legendary themed pictures. Cameron's photographic career was short (about 12 years) and came late in her life. Her work had a huge impact on the development of modern photography, especially her closely cropped portraits which are still mimicked today. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight can still be visited.In 1863, when Cameron was 48 years old, her daughter gave her a camera as a present, thereby starting her career as a photographer. Within a year, Cameron became a member of the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland. In her photography, Cameron strove to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied."

Cameron’s style of photography

The pictorial effects and use of focus are among the most discussed aspects of the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron. Cameron made prints from collodion negatives and her images typically have an out of focus quality. She was criticised by some of her contemporaries for what they considered the technical failure of her work given that the collodian negative could produce images of great clarity and detail.

In Annals of my Glass House (1874) Cameron recognised and fuelled early interest in how and why she started to produce prints stopping short of sharp focus explaining:'my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were a fluke. That is to say, that when focussing and coming to something which, to my eye, was very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.'

Equipment Cameron would use. Julia Margaret Cameron made albumen silver prints from wet collodion glass plate negatives. This is a complex and exacting process. A small error at any stage of preparing the negative or developing the print can dramatically effect the look of the final photograph and as Mrs Cameron discovered, the permanence of the negative.

Cameron also worried about using dangerous chemicals including cyanide of potassium. Writing to Herschel in March 1864 she notes 'the cyanide of potassium is the most nervous part of the whole process to me. It is such a deadly poison' asking him 'Need I be so very afraid of the cyanide in case of a scratch on my hand?'

Brief analysis of 3 images

This is a portrait of Sir John Herschel taken in 1988. It was done by using photogravure, which is is an intaglio printmaking or photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio print that can reproduce the detail and continuous tones of a photograph. This style of developing makes the image grainy and sepia in colour.

Sir John Herschel, 1867/1893

Brief analysis of 3 images This portrait of Hardinge Hay Cameron was taken in 1864 using albumen silver photograph from collodion negative. To make a Negative; first the sheet of glass is cleaned. Cameron’s first camera held glass plates roughly 12 x 10 inch, her second camera, purchased in 1866, held 15 x 12 inch plates. A solution of collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether and alcohol mixed with salts) was then poured evenly over the plate and made sensitive to light in the dark room with a coating of silver nitrate salts.The damp plate was then ready to be placed in the camera. Cameron used a standard sliding-box camera and a French made Jamin lens with a fixed aperture of f3.6 and a focal length of roughly 12 inches. After removing the lens cap the exposure time required was between three and seven minutes.The glass plate was then taken back to the dark room still damp and a solution of developer was poured over it. The negative was washed and then bathed in hypo or cyanide to fix the image and remove unexposed silver salts. It was washed again and finally coated with varnish to enable multiple prints to be made from the plate without damaging it.

Hardinge Hay Cameron 1846 / 1911

Brief analysis of 3 images

This portrait of Julia Jackson was taken in 1864 made by albumen print from wet collodion-0n-glass negative. Julia Margaret Cameron was primarily concerned with 'picture making' rather than using photography to make a straight record of people, events or places. She was adventurous, innovative and unpredictable in the methods she employed to compose her photographs, the expressive power of a composition over riding her concerns for technical perfection.

Julia Jackson

MICHELLE SANK

By Charlie and Adele

ICONIC PICTURE

These images have one awards in the field of photography wining the Lens Culture International Exposure Award.

BIOGRAPHY

Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa.

She left here in 1978 and has been living in England

since 1987. Her images reflect a preoccupation with

the human condition and o his end can be viewed as

social documentary. Her work encompasses issues

around social and cultural diversity.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S STYLE

The style of the photographer is straight forward

approach with the subject matters centered in the

middle of the picture. The colours in the images are

bold and eye catching.

BRIEF ANALYSIS

The content of the image is a boy

jumping of a sand dune, it was taken

with a digital camera in natural lighting

with a fast shutter speed. The colours

are limited and subtle, with a contrast

of light and dark tones making the boy

stand out against the white

background. There is a lot of negative

space in the sky and is very busy in the

bottom section.

The content of the image is a girl slightly of centered in the middle of the path. There is a high contrast between the dull colours around her but her dress stands out against them making it eye catching. The perceptive in the picture are the lines of the walls drawing you into the image and enabling to see in the distant.

The content of the image is of a

young girl slightly of centered on the

right hand side. The colours are very

bold and bright complementing each

other and making them stand out.

The image is taken at a slightly low

angle and is very minimal. Hence

you are able to discover the where

about to the thin rock line a the

bottom of the image.

INSPIRATION

The inspiration you take from her work is to take

images at different view points and to match their

character with the surrounding. Tips are to some

times stick to straight forward approaches getting

effective pieces.

Eve Arnold Cassie and Jack

Biography

• Eve Arnold was born Eve Cohen on April 21 1912 in Philadelphia, one of nine children. Her parents were Russian Jews who had fled persecution. Although her father was a rabbi and well-educated, he could find work only as a pedlar, and Eve grew up in poverty.

• Throughout her long career Eve Arnold’s pictures were always marked by understanding and compassion. She never strove for effect, and in the 1950s revelled in the advantages the new reportage had over studio-bound photographers. It allowed her to show celebrities in spontaneous mood, and to achieve unusual levels of intimacy and trust with her subjects, especially women.

Iconic image

Image Analysis

• Haiti 1954

The image has tone and an emotional property because Eve Arnold used levels of trust to achieve a component of intimacy in her photographs which has been her technique throughout her career including candid celebrity photography gaining the trust of Hollywoods finest such as Marilyn Monroe.

Image Analysis

This is a candid photograph of Marilyn Monroe, the image contains various colors and texture as well as geometrical line. This captures what she may look like as she is having some time to herself and an insight in to the sort of thing she enjoyed.

Image Analysis

This is a controversial photo taken in Virginia 1958 where black and white children are introduced in schools for the first time at the opening of new mixed schools. The photograph is iconic as well as interesting showing the tension between the two subjects creating the viewer to feel awkward.

Style of the Photographer

• Arnold increasingly alternated between colour features on people's daily lives and glamorous silver screen portraits.

• Eve Arnold was a single-minded and determined documentary photographer, and a portraitist who won the trust of her famous subjects.

• Although she worked for all the great colour picture magazines, then in their heyday, her preference stayed with black-and-white.

• Visual examples would be the many shots that she has done of Marilyn Monroe and other famous figure

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold

Tips and Inspiration

Tips

• Become close with the subject so that you can capture a more intimate image

• Record the essence of the subject

• Develop themes extensively so you have more to work with

Inspiration

• The soft black and white tone of images

• Becoming close with the subject to capture mood

• Don’t pose all the images because then you capture subjects at their most relaxed

Jane Bown

Daw

n & Christie

Biography

• Born in Dorset, 1925• Worked for The Observer since 1949• In 1985 she received an MBE, then in 1995 she

was upgraded to CBE• She studied photography at Guildford College.

Style

Her images are primarily in black and white. She uses available light that is usually always natural. This can be seen in her images as the lighting is usually very soft, creating a silk-like texture on the skin of her subjects.

Equipment

Her equipment is interesting because it’s unusually basic. She uses a forty-year old camera and no studio/artificial lights.She has not opted to shoot withdigital even since the introductionof it.

Analysis 1

• Strong contrast• It is tonally diverse• Although the contrast

is strong, the lighting still appears soft

• It is effective• There are strong

shadows throughout however this does not overpower the image like some shadows can

Analysis 2

• Very soft lighting• Very grey, not a high

range of tones• Showing a key

element of the subject• Rule of 3rds• Natural lighting • Environmental

portrait

Analysis 3

• Strong contrast• It is tonally diverse• Strong detail even

though it’s dark• Unusual use of profile

for a portrait• As everything in the

image is so dark, except for her face, this is highlighted

Tips & Inspiration

• From this we can take the creative use of natural light

• Capturing people in a natural environment, without forced posing or facial expression.