RECREATION NO. 5

I was trying to use Cindy Sherman's idea from her series "Untitled Movie Stills". I wanted to create my own "untitled" movie where all the pictures would tell a story, but with no plot or dialogue (just as Cindy's) and the reader would make up the order and the story behind them, even the genre that this might fit in. Is this a Hitchcock Movie? Is this an indie flick? A horro fllm?

I borrowed the idea from Cindy's and the lightning and the use of black and white. Everything else is original.

Recreation No. 5 - Semi contemporary photographer

Cindy Sherman

• January 19, 1954, New Jersey


• Started as a painter in Buffalo State College, moved to photography


• "I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead."


• Sherman works in series, typically photographing herself in a range of costumes.


• To create her photographs, Sherman shoots alone in her studio, assuming multiple roles as author, director, make-up artist, hairstylist, wardrobe mistress, and of course, model.


• Her work is varied and not limited as photographer, as she had worked in the past as Film director and film producer, as well as advertiser fashion photographer for Marc Jacobs


• Recipient to a MacArthur fellowship in 1995, that granted her $500,000 USD during five years.

Quotes that I found Inspirational

• "I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear."


• "If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already.. the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of."


• "I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity."


















EDIT

Found this video this weekend and thought it was interesting.

Recreation 05 - Historical Photographer

Jhon Heartfield

• John Heartfield (19 June 1891, Berlin – 26 April 1968, East Berlin), Real name Helmut Herzfeld.


• Choose to change his name to criticize the nationalism and anti-british feeling on Germany during WW1


• 1918 - Joins the Berlin Dada and the Comunist party.


• 1919 - Dismissed from the party for accusation on supporting a famous strike


• 1920 - Organized the first Dada Fain in Berlin


• 1924 - Meet Brecht. Tried photomontage for the first time


• Worked with two communist publications


• 1933 - Relocated to Czechoslovakia


• 1938 - Relocates to England because of political fear


• 1954 - Returns to Germany and worked with Besson and Langhoff, famous theater directors


• 1967 - prepares a exhibition with his photomontages on Berlin, dies before finishing


• Famous work: Photomontages satirizing the Nazi propaganda to undermine their message

Most famous picture




Translation


"Hurray, the butter is gone!"

Goering said that "Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat"

Recreation 04 - POPULAR MEDIA

THE FAME - MONSTER

When thinking about Popular Media, the first idea that comes into my mind are singers and artists. The spotlight. The stage. How they seem to be surrounded by this light and how they glamour us into this frenzy creatures. I am genuinely inspired and intrigued by Lady Gaga. I believe her randomness is part of what makes her success just as much as my randomness and quirkiness makes my own success.

For this piece I decided to "disintegrate" the image into the iconic pieces, becuase that's what we remember about them and what makes them popular icons. For me, being an artist is trading off your "realness" for something much more easily readable, like downgrading pictures from a high quality with all those little tiny details, into easy to be read pixels. I wanted to recreate the iconic look with cheap easy materials on my dispositions, such as my own clothing, in a way also meaning that I have the elements to become "Gaga".

Recreation 04 - Semi Contemporary Photographer

Semi-Contemporary Photographer


Andy Warhol

• Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 6, 1928


• Born of immigrant working class parents


• Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (now Carnegie Mellon University).


• In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a career in magazine illustration and advertising. During the 1950s, he gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style

• His first one-man art-gallery exhibition as a fine artist[12][13] was on July 9, 1962, in the Ferus Gallery of Los Angeles. The exhibition marked the West Coast debut of pop art.


• The exhibit included the works Marilyn Diptych, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills.


• It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of iconic American products such as Campbell's Soup Cans and Coca-Cola bottles, as well as paintings of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Troy Donahue, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory," his studio during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians, and underground celebrities. He began producing prints using the silkscreen method [15] His work became popular and controversial.


• To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. It was the gallerist Muriel Latow who came up with the ideas for both the soup cans and Warhol's dollar paintings.


• He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.


• The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style – artistically and personally affectless.


• Warhol worked across a wide range of media – painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than 60 films, plus some 500 short black-and-white "screen test" portraits of Factory visitors

Recreation 04 - Historical Photographer

Historical Photographer:

Nickolas Muray

• Muray attended a graphic arts school in Budapest, where he studied lithography, photoengraving, and photography.


• took a three-year course in color photoengraving in Berlin,


• In 1913, with the threat of war in Europe, Muray sailed to New York City, and was able to find work as a color printer in Brooklyn.


• 1920, Muray had opened a portrait studio at his home in Greenwich Village


• In 1921 he received a commission from Harper's Bazaar to do a portrait of the Broadway actress Florence Reed; soon after he was having photographs published each month in Harper's Bazaar.


• Between 1920 and 1940, Nickolas Muray made over 10,000 portraits.


• His 1938's portrait of Frida Kahlo, made while Kahlo sojourned in New York, attending her exhibit at the Julien Levy Gallery, became the best known and loved portrait made by Muray

• From here on, Muray and Kahlo developed an intense affair by 10 years, which ended once Kahlo decided that she was staying with Rivera and not with Muray, who married his fourth wife.


• After the market crash, Murray turned away from celebrity and theatrical portraiture, and become a pioneering commercial photographer, famous for his creation of many of the conventions of color advertising


• He was considered the master of the three-color carbro process.(Using Carbon and phosphorus to print pictures in a dark room)

RECREATION 03: MEMORIES

How was your weekend? - 2011


Composition: A slanted angle of myself in first plane overlaid a shot of my desktop in the same position with lines of a hinted rush created by placing the camera on the tripod and rotating it.

Concept/Aboutness/Idea: I wanted to convey the idea of how my weekend usually is. It's me waking up and going straight to the computer to do homework or assignments. I have tons of activities to do and so little time to go out and have fun as the average standard due. (Besides weather didn't let me do so). I also usually eat in front of the computer and have most of my social life through it to catch up with friends and family from back home.

Composition: A full close up shot of my face in five different emotional gestures each one being circled in victorian-esque golden circles with a red background.

Concept/Aboutness/Idea: In Mexico is pretty common to have "Caritas" (little faces). Families often go to photographers, who sometimes are located in "Mercaditos" or "Tianguis" (Little Markets) where they go and get their groceries and they get their babies to pose on five different gestures.

This is actually an European old fashion tradition brought up from the Victorian era to Mexico during the conquest of the country. Some scholars point out that it was High Society who often had photographers do this, but as technology became available everybody started doing so.

My family as good Mexicans had this pictures of myself and my sister. Sadly I couldn't get the original one to compare them, but I wanted to recreate that memory of childhood through recreating it digitally and also to bring some sort of that old casual happy feeling that is pretty common on Mexicans.

Recreation 03

Historical Photographer:



Biography: Carleton Emmons Watkins was born in Oneonta, upstate New York. He went to San Francisco during the gold rush, arriving in 1851. He traveled to California with Oneontan Collis Huntington, who later became one of the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad, which helped Watkins later in his career.

His interest in photography started as an aide in a San Francisco portrait studio, and started taking photographs of his own in 1861. He became interested in landscape photography and soon started making photographs of California mining scenes and of Yosemite Valley. He experimented with several new photographic techniques, and eventually favored his "Mammoth Camera," which used large glass plate negatives, and a stereographic camera.

Significance: Most of the work of Watkins is based on the mining scenes of the wild California while the Gold Rush. It's mostly about the historical timing and how he managed to capture that particular movement that was really important in the history of the USA.

Techniques: He used stereoscopy camera in order to create "stereoview" photographs: Two images where placed one next to the other in order to create an ilusion of depth. It was the very first device to "enhance" the reality and to create an illusion of 3D



Motivations: I believe there is a form of metaphor in this as Watkins was a young and naive photographer exploring new techniques and new exciting photograph of a place that was young and just barely explored.



Contemporary Photograph: Takeshi Murata





Biography: Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 with a B.F.A. in Film/Video/Animation.

Significance: His work take advantage of video art, which is where most of the industry is going forward these days. Most of his work is abstract creating hallucinating experiences by piecing together different video clips.

Composition: The author construct video art and sequential art in movement completely different from the standard way we think of video art. He usually mixes clips and media or sometimes creates psychodelic experience through using bits and parts of film and reconstructing them by placing them together or juxtapozing it.

Concept/Aboutness/Idea: I think that he is trying to show how much we can do with so little and go beyond this idea of "sequential" art as having a structure or a solid foundation. Also, how the experience of mass media (since most of his clips are from media broadcasting) can be somewhat dazing and intrusive.

Method: What I find interesting is his take on sequential art and how much he can create on moving images with only little effects and clever editing.

Motivations: At the time he is presenting his art, video and broadcasting media were the rulers and dictators of what the average user knew about the outside world. They were the primary dealers of knowledge and as a visionary, he defies this concept by destroying it using simple editing techniques. Now with the appearance of the internet, we question the knowledge and utility of broadcasting media, since we can get the information through using the social media.

Your Opinion: I find incredible interesting that he creates appealing art out of ordinary and casual clips. I also find the psycodelic experience to be original and as an audience it intrigues me and draws me in.

Contemporary Photographer: Andres Serrano

Biography: Serrano is from a half Honduran, half Afro-Cuban background and was raised a strict Roman Catholic. He studied from 1967 to 1969 at the Brooklyn Museum and Art School, and lives and works in New York. Serrano is represented in New York and Paris by Yvon Lambert Gallery.

His work has been exhibited in locations as varied and prestigious as the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in London (2001) and in the Collection Lambert Avignon France (2006). (from Wikipedia)



Piss Christ, 1987. Type C Photographic print. Dimensions vary with edition.



The Morgue: Burn Victim, 1992 . Cibachrome Print. from edition of 3.

Significance: Serrano is mostly know for being part of the "shock art" movement, a term described for an artistic movement where the author tries to shock the audience with the gruesome and powerful art present, often times with them trying to find the beauty even in the most despicable situations.

This particularly can be seen in his "Shit" series, where he takes macro photograph of feces, often times, turning the gruesome picture into a well crafted product shot. The same can be said about his "Morgue" series, where he shot different corpses and the well crafting of lighting and frame created unique pictures turning something horrid into something beautiful.

Composition: Most of his work is often carefully framed and lighten in order to create a sensation of contradictory feelings: a vogue feeling of inspiring beauty and a primal natural rejection feeling due the element portrayed. Most of the time he uses elements of fashion photography and fashion elements for over produced photos applied to gruesome or shocking elements.



Heaven and Hell, 1985. Type C Photographic print. Dimensions vary with edition.




Concept/Aboutness/Idea: I believe that he speaks for a current time that we live, where the true values have been lost over the idea of the "facade". We live in a particular world where the carcass seems to be more important than the whole content and what is inside.

Serrano portrays this idea by presenting images that are extremely beautiful crafted, but the subject in the picture is often times in a pose or in a way that defies this idea of "beauty". The juxtaposition of both ideas create a meaningful experience for the audience, one that they may not forget and defies the cannons of what the scholars and the average people consider as "art".



Method: What I've seen is that most of the times the images are all created on studio: the use of carefully placed lightning and background drops gives this vibe of crafted photos, but at the same time, the subjects are somewhat taboo for the idea that society has placed over them.

Motivations: I believe Serrano tries constantly to go beyond and shock the people with his work, often times going further. Particularly, he goes lengths constantly to find how to shock them and I personally think this statement has to be taken into careful consideration, as there is a fine line between the transgressive and the downright aggressive.

Your Opinion: What particularly made me choose him was this idea of crafting and finding the beauty even in the most horrible elements. I believe that beauty, specially in photography, is quite playful and sometimes, even avoiding; often times photography is used to convey what we believe is beautiful to be kept, but we often overlook or frown upon those negative things on life that balance it.

Recreation No. 2

Original Picture:


August Sander's / Young Farmers (1914)


Biography: August Sander was a German portrait and documentary photographer. Sander's first book Face of our Time (German title: Antlitz der Zeit) was published in 1929. Sander has been described as "the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century."

Significance: What Sander tried to do was capture a moment and a specific time in space. Something was changing socially in the Germany (the entrance of the Nazi party to the power) and he was capturing that moment through the people that he portrait.

Composition: A mostly dark photograph showing three guys in the midst of a walk, somewhat posed and somewhat natural, they see straight at the camera in the middle of a blank dark field.

Concept: Capturing a moment straight out of the people that were living it. The art of Sanders is on the people that was living a change, that was living a social turmoil and on the event, rather than on the photograph.

Motivation: The motivation comes mostly from portraying the German fellowmen in an original and authentic way, without taking away any emotion, (happiness, worry or anxiety) from it.

My Recreation:

Composition: The idea of capturing an event and let it be shown in the faces or in the poses of the models is what captured my idea. I tried to emulate the "three figures" composition on my piece, yet take another turn and make it a photograph that could stand by it's own.

Concept: Again, trying to capture a moment that was happening. The three guys are just like Sanders' Countrymen: friends and people that are sharing with me a goal and a terrain (being all CAS students and we were all part of a GameJam event at that particular time). I tried to take them as natural as possible, letting them do as they needed to do.

Recreation

Original Picture:



Biography: Clarence John Laughlin was a photographer in the past 20th century.
Born in Louisiana in 1905 and died on January 2nd, 1985.

Something that I'd like to point out, (taken straight from Wikipedia):

Many historians credit Laughlin as being the first true surrealist photographer in the United States. His images are often nostalgic, reflecting the influence of Eugene Atget and other photographers who tried to capture vanishing urban landscapes.

Significance: Definitively the picture given has this particular nostalgic that wikipedia points out, a feeling of yearning for something that is outside of us, or unreacheable. (Perhaps due the main focal point being a person watching at the distance with his head up).

Composition: A well contrasted photograph with mostly grays and a strong focal point at the center of the photograph of a human being with a black shirt. It's notorious that this element is framed in the middle and contrasted against the cloudy soft background and the rough hard textured foreground of a wall.

Concept: Again, nostalgy. There is this underlying feeling of having something, but yearning for something that is either lost or not still reachable.
Method: I do not believe there was any particular method other than the guy doing architectural photograph. However it's important to mention that the architecture happens to lose it's own focal point to the whole emotion that is conveyed here.

Motivation: Again, I think this picture is not thought or produced, but rather, a simple excercise of photography that turned out quite well.
Opinion: I am in love with photographs that portrait feelings. It's really hard to produce a picture with such a result, since most of the work of the emotion is not on the author but on the audience that is looking at.

My recreation for this:

Composition: Behind the picture, I wanted to portray this feeling of missing and I believe that the high contrast of the picture is due the two textures being shown, one being hard and rough and the other soft and faded. This is the reason as to why I used it two elements on the same vein (a window frame and the snow on the background) to recreate this feeling.

Concept: Again the nostalgy, I wanted a human being at the center to place the final element that brings off this concept on the original picture, but lacking the resources (time) I had to come up with a different and more creative solution: a cut out of a character from a magazine, a little kid who is looking on the other side. This just suited it.