Ways of Seeing

John Berger- Ways of Seeing

John Berger 2009

John Peter Berger (born 5 November 1926) is an English art critic, novelist, painter, poet and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize.

Berger began his career as a painter and exhibited work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career

While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman. His Marxist humanism and his strongly stated opinions on modern art made him a controversial figure early in his career. He titled an early collection of essays Permanent Red, in part as a statement of political commitment, and later wrote that before the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States he had felt constrained not to criticize the former's policies; afterwards his attitude toward the Soviet state became considerably more critical

In 1958 Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John. The book's political currency and detailed description of an artist's working process led to some readers mistaking it for a true story. After being available for a month, the work was withdrawn by the publisher, under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The novels immediately succeeding A Painter of Our Time were The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom; both presented an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. In 1962 Berger's distaste for life in Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in France.

In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing (directed by Mike Dibb) and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images. The work was in part derived from Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Berger's novel G., a romantic picaresque set in Europe in 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the Booker Berger made a point of donating half his cash prize to the Black Panther Party in Britain, and retaining half to support his work on the study of migrant workers that became A Seventh Man, insisting on both as necessary parts of his political struggle.

Many of his texts, from sociological studies to fiction and poetry, deal with experience. Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). His research for A Seventh Man led to an interest in the world which migrant workers had left behind: isolated rural communities. It was his work on this theme that led him to settle in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s. Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, his frequent collaborator, seek to document and to understand intimately the lived experiences of their peasant subjects. Their subsequent book Another Way of Telling discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography both through Berger's essays and Mohr's photographs. His studies of single artists include most prominently The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), a survey of the modernist's career; and Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny, Endurance, and the Role of the Artist, on the Soviet dissident sculptor's aesthetic and political contributions.

In the 1970s Berger collaborated with the Swiss director Alain Tanner on several films; he wrote or co-wrote La Salamandre (1971), The Middle of the World (1974) and Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 (1976). His major fictional work of the 1980s, the trilogy Into Their Labours (made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag), treats the European peasant experience from its farming roots into contemporary economic and political displacement and urban poverty.

In recent essays Berger has written about photography, art, politics, and memory; he published in The Shape of a Pocket a correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos, and written short stories appearing in the Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. His sole volume of poetry is Pages of the Wound, though other volumes such as the theoretical essay And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos contain poetry as well as prose. His recent novels include To the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis stemming from his own familial experience, and King: A Street Story, a novel on homeless and shantytown life told from the perspective of a street dog. Berger initially insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page of King, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.

Berger's 1980 volume About Looking includes an influential chapter, "Why Look at Animals?" It is cited by numerous scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies, a group that seeks broadly to consider human-animal relations and the cultural construction of terms such as "human", "animal" and so on. Collectively they took Berger's question to mean that scholars are surrounded by animals but often do not actually see them, and that there are good theoretical and ethical reasons to study animals in the humanities. The chapter was later reproduced in a Penguin Great Ideas selection of essays of the same name.

Berger's most recent novel, From A to X, was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize;Berger and Salman Rushdie were the only former winners to be nominated in that year. His latest book, Bento's Sketchbook (2011), has been described as "a characteristically sui generis work, combining an engagement with the thought of the 17th-century lens grinder, draughtsman and philosopher Baruch Spinoza with a study of drawing and a series of semi-autobiographical sketches"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger

Susan Saltage

Susan Saltage

ontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Mildred (née Jacobson) and Jack Rosenblatt, both Jewish. Her father managed a fur trading business in China, where he died of tuberculosis in 1939, when Susan was five years old. Seven years later, her mother married Nathan Sontag. Susan and her sister, Judith, were given their stepfather's surname, although he never adopted them formally. Sontag did not have a religious upbringing. She claimed not to have entered a synagogue until her mid-twenties.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Sontag

On Photography

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images.

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml

The Image World – Susan Sontag (1977)

Susan Sontag’s On Photography is a text that every photography theory student grapples with at one point or another. I read it myself a good year before starting this course but if there was ever a case of something you read going in one eye and out the other this was it. Second time around it’s a bit more accessible but the sheer density of ideas in it makes it a challenging read. “The Image World” is the last essay in the book and sums up many of the ideas that went before.

In spite of the claims of science and humanism that an objective non-image based understanding of reality is now possible, our culture has become more and more dependent on images, rather than less, and this can be attributed to the influence of photography. Photography and the “Image World” that it creates, has unique and peculiar properties that make it radically different to other forms of image-making, and Sontag’s essay explores the ramifications of this.

Photography can provide knowledge independent of experience and can capture, classify and store the information in a way that provides possibilities for control not feasible under earlier forms of information storage. It is an incomparable tool for predicting, analysing and controlling behavior because it is closer to the real, in fact it is a “trace, something directly stenciled off the real”. Like Barthes, in Camera Lucida, Sontag sees photographs, and the reality they depict, as inextricably linked. A photograph is an “extension of the subject” and a “potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over it”. This echoes pre-Christian attitudes towards the image: photography has rekindled “something like the primitive status of images”.

She explains how photography is a form of acquisition in several senses: surrogate possession of cherished people or things; a way of consuming events; and a means of acquiring something as information. Photography’s close proximity to the real gives it a power akin to the “primitive status” of images. Balzac’s fear of being photographed (echoes of Barthes again); our increasingly tenuous grasp of reality itself; superstitions about destroying photographs of loved ones; people’s obsessive urge to photograph and be photographed: these are all cited as evidence of the primacy of the magical “image-world”. Photographs as substitututes for erotic experiences (Cocteau, Ballard) is also described as a common facet of the image-world.

Sontag also discusses photography as a means of possessing reality itself, particularly the past but notes Proust’s scorn for this notion: he derides the visual image as a poor substitute for the full spectrum of senses. She concludes this section of the essay by reiterating that photographs do more than document the past, they provide a “new way of dealing with the present”- in essence a new way of documenting, reflecting upon, mediating and experiencing reality.

It can however deaden our experience of the real world; if we have experienced it before in the image-world, it’s impact is lessened. It allows us a form of vicarious experience and in doing so anaesthecises us from the real.

She then takes the example of China, where uses of photography are limited to propaganda and family (posed) snapshots. She discusses how the non-participation of the Chinese with the image-world, results in a radically different interpretation of imagery and uses Antonioni’s film about China (or more precisely the Chinese reaction to it) as an illustration of this.

She discusses the issue of the aesthetic versus the instrumental, deciding these approaches are both inherent to photography, and returns again to the centrality of the image-world to a capitalist society – the masses consume images and the rulers use them to control the masses. Photography has in essence destroyed Plato’s idea of an image-free way of considering the world, as images and reality are bound together as never before. Her final call is for an “ecology of images” – a way of preserving, documenting, classifying, understanding and navigating the image-world.

This essay is very dense stuff so it is difficult to take it all in, even with multiple readings. In summary it’s about how the image-world affects our experience of reality and functions as something of a warning – unless we learn to control it, it will be used to control us. It’s difficult to extract a single overall point other than that photography has radically altered our culture (and it is its realist nature that is responsible) and that we need to work out ways of dealing with this. If we don’t it will be used as an instrument of control and repression, as is the case in China.

I didn’t fully get her point about China – is she saying that it is the population’s lack of participation in the image-world that is allowing them to be easily controlled? That they are not visually literate enough to see how they are being duped? If so, that seem somewhat unfair on the Chineses, even taking into account the fact that this was written in the mid-70s.

http://tracesofthereal.com/2009/11/07/the-image-world-susan-sontag-1977/

John Rankin

John Rankin

Born John Rankin Waddell 1966.

British Photographer.

Famous for portrait and fashion photography.

John Rankin Waddell, or simply Rankin, is an English photographer, publisher and director. His portfolio includes photo-shoots with Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair, The Rolling Stones, U2, Schwarzenegger, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Leonardo di Caprio… Among the many projects he has founded are the magazine and digital television station “Dazed & Confused.” His first feature film, “The Lives of the Saints,” garnered the main jury prize at Salento. He has also released several books, the latest of which, “Beautiful,” is about the most famous women in the world and their beauty. Rankin doesn’t repeat himself and doesn’t fit into any framework. His works are intimate, refined, witty and paradoxical.

Waddell was brought up in St Albans, Hertfordshire. At the age of 21, whilst studying accounting at Brighton Polytechnic, he realised that his interests lay elsewhere and dropped out, taking up the study photography at London College of Printing. During this time, Rankin met Jefferson Hack, with whom he formed a working relationship. The two decided to start a magazine together called Dazed & Confused once they had graduated.

In 1999 Hack and Rankin founded Dazed Film & TV, a production company that would produce the first mast-head[clarification needed] television broadcast ever, the four hour special Renegade TV Gets Dazed, for Channel 4. In December 2000 Rankin launched his own quarterly fashion magazine, RANK. He also publishes Another Magazine, Another Man and more recently "HUNGER".

His many subjects have included Britney Spears, Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue, Spice Girls, Madonna, David Bowie, Björk, Juliette Binoche, Lily Allen, Kevin Spacey, The Rolling Stones, Vivienne Westwood, Cate Blanchett, Damien Hirst, Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair and M.I.A..

In addition, Rankin has donated his services to publicity campaigns for the charitable organisation Women's Aid, providing photographs for use in the What's it going to take? and Valentine's Day campaigns.

Rankin began 2009 by inviting people across the UK to participate in his project Rankin Live!. A show of two halves, Rankin brought a museum scale retrospective of the last 22 years of Rankin’s photographic life, together with portraits of 1500 of today’s British public. Open to people over thirteen who had a distinctive style, sense of British eccentricity and enthusiasm. The participants were invited to the Rankin Live exhibition at the Truman Brewery in August to sit for their personal shoot. The portraits produced on the day were hung as part of the ever-changing exhibition and uploaded to the Rankin Live website.

In April 2009 Rankin created ‘’Annroy’’, a contemporary structure designed by Trevor Horne Architects that is home to Rankin’s own state-of-the-art photographic studio, gallery and chic living space, where he lives with his wife and model Tuuli Shipster. Each month ‘’Annroy’’ holds a different exhibition, which features some of Rankin’s current work.

Rankin was first married to actress Kate Hardie. They married in 1995, divorced in 1998 and had a son, Lyle, together.

Rankin has photographed some of Hollywood’s most famous people and has shot some world-renowned campaigns, including Nike, Umbro, Reebok, Marks and Spencer’s, Rimmel, L’Oreal, Hugo Boss, Levi's, Shiatzy Chen, Thomas Wylde, Longchamp, Aussi, Madonna for H&M, Dove, BMW, and Coca Cola.

Rankin has made commercial television advertisements with Chris Cottam, including for the Dove range of products and Rimmel cosmetics. The duo also made The Lives of the Saints, a gangster film set in London.[citation needed] They have also made music promo videos for Kelis ‘’Acapella”, Nelly Furtado ‘’Say It Right’’, Marina and the Diamonds ‘’I Am Not A Robot’’, Robyn ‘’Cobrastyle’’, Sky Ferreira "One", The Noisettes Ever Fallen in Love, and The Enemy ‘’No Time for Tears’’.

In January 2009, BBC 4 broadcast his 1 hour documentary Seven Photographs that Changed Fashion, in which he created his own tributes to the iconic images by Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, David Bailey and Guy Bourdin. He interviewed an array of original photographers, models and assistants, and used contemporary models including Heidi Klum, Erin O'Connor, Jade Parfitt, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, his wife Tuuli Shipster, Mollie Gondi, Daphne Guinness and David Gandy.

In 2010, Rankin travelled to South Africa with the BBC to shoot the documentary, South Africa in Pictures. He explored the country’s rich photographic tradition, discovering how its photographers have captured this complex and turbulent nation through some remarkable images, charting the important role that photography has played in documenting its story.[3] The same year, Rankin was commissioned by Nike and Bono’s R.E.D in the fight against HIV/AIDS, to shoot a global Nike campaign, Lace Up Save Lives, to raise awareness about the disease.

Rankin was involved with television reality show Britain's Missing Top Model. The show followed eight young women with disabilities who competed for a modeling contract, which includes a photo shoot with Rankin and a cover photo in Marie Claire. Rankin has shot for Germany's Next Topmodel, where he was a guest judge, and regularly works with the winner of Cycle 2 of Britains Next Top Model Lianna Fowler.

In 2011 Rankin served as the photography teacher in the Channel 4 series Jamie's Dream School featuring Jamie Oliver. He also presented the BBC Four documentary America in Pictures - The Story of Life Magazine. In May 2012 it was confirmed that Rankin would be re-shooting Azealia Banks's music video for her single "Liquorice". 

rakin's photos of irises put on the face of "swatch x art"

john rankin:a focus on eyes

john rankin wearing his "swatch xart" timepieces

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/18676/john-rankin-a-focus-on-eyes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankin_(photographer)

http://rankin.co.uk/biography/

Sally Mann

(Very Short Depth of Field)

Sally Mann 2007

Born Sally Turner Munger, May 1, 1951.

Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children and the only daughter. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann graduated from The Putney School in 1969, and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and a MA in creative writing in 1975. She took up photography at Putney, where, she claims, her motive was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. She made her photographic debut at Putney, with an image of a nude classmate. Her father encouraged her interest in photography; His 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.

Early career

After graduation, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid 1970s she photographed the construction of its new law school building, the Lewis Hall (now the Sydney Lewis Hall), leading to her first one-woman exhibition in late 1977 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Those surrealistic images were subsequently included as part of her first book, Second Sight, published in 1984.

Sally Mann 1971

Sally Mann 1978

Sally Mann 1971

Her second collection, At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women, published in 1988, stimulated controversy. The images “captured the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls [and the] expressive printing style lent a dramatic and brooding mood to all of her images.”

Mann is perhaps best known for Immediate Family, her third collection, published in 1992. The NY Times said, “Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world.” The book consists of 65 black-and-white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10. Many of the pictures were taken at the family's remote summer cabin along the river, where the children played and swam in the nude. Many explore typical childhood themes (skinny dipping, reading the funnies, dressing up, vamping, napping, playing board games) but others touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death. The controversy on its release was intense, including accusations of child pornography (both in America and abroad) and of contrived fiction with constructed tableaux. One image of her 4-year-old daughter (Virginia at 4) was censored by the Wall Street Journal with black bars over her eyes, nipples and pubic area. Mann herself considered these photographs to be “natural through the eyes of a mother, since she has seen her children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked." Critics agreed, saying her “vision in large measure [is] accurate, and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence,” and that the book “created a place that looked like Eden, then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality and death." When Time magazine named her “America’s Best Photographer” in 2001, it wrote:

Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care.

1984-1991

The New Republic considered it "one of the great photograph books of our time."

Her fourth book, Still Time, published in 1994, was based on the catalogue of a traveling exhibition that included more than 20 years of her photography. The 60 images included more photographs of her children, but also earlier landscapes with color and abstract photographs.

Later career

In the mid 1990s, Mann began photographing landscapes on wet plate collodion 8x10 glass negatives, and again used the same 100-year-old 8 x 10 bellows view camera that she had used for all the previous bodies of work. These landscapes were first seen in Still Time, and later featured in two shows presented by the Edwynn Houk Gallery in NYC: Sally Mann – Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia in 1997, and then in Deep South: Landscapes of Louisiana and Mississippi in 1999. Many of these large (40"x50") black-and-white and manipulated prints were taken using the 19th century “wet plate” process, or collodion, in which glass plates are coated with collodion, dipped in silver nitrate, and exposed while still wet. This gave the photographs what the New York Times called “a swirling, ethereal image with a center of preternatural clarity," and showed many flaws and artifacts, some from the process and some introduced by Mann.

Mann’s fifth book, What Remains, published in 2003, is based on the show of the same name at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC and is in five parts. The first section contains photographs of the remains of Eva, her greyhound, after decomposition. The second part has the photographs of dead and decomposing bodies at a federal Forensic Anthropology Facility (known as the ‘body farm’). The third part details the site on her property where an armed escaped convict was killed. The fourth part is a study of the grounds of Antietam, the site of the bloodiest single day battle in American history during the Civil War. The last part is a study of close-ups of the faces of her children. Thus, this study of mortality, decay and death ends with hope and love.

Mann’s sixth book, Deep South, published in 2005, with 65 black-and-white images, includes landscapes taken from 1992 to 2004 using both conventional 8x10 film and wet plate collodion. These photographs have been described as “haunted landscapes of the south, battlefields, decaying mansion, kudzu shrouded landscapes and the site where Emmett Till was murdered." "Newsweek" picked it as their book choice for the holiday season, saying that Mann “walks right up to every Southern stereotype in the book and subtly demolishes each in its turn by creating indelibly disturbing images that hover somewhere between document and dream."

Mann's seventh book, Proud Flesh, published in 2009, is a study taken over six years of the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband Larry Mann. The project was displayed in Gagosian Gallery in October 2009.

Mann's eighth book, The Flesh and The Spirit, published in 2010, was released in conjunction with a comprehensive show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. Though not a retrospective, this 200 page book includes new and recent work (unpublished self-portraits, landscapes, images of her husband, her children's faces, and of the dead at a forensic institute) as well as early works (unpublished color photographs of her children in the 1990s, color Polaroids and platinum prints from the 1970s). Its unifying theme is the body, with its vagaries of illnesses and death, and includes essays by John Ravenal, David Levi Strauss and Anne Wilkes Tucker.

Her current projects include a series of self-portraits, a multipart study of the legacy of slavery in Virginia, and intimate images of her family and life. The latter, entitled "Marital Trust," spans 30 years, and includes intimate details of her family life with Larry. 

In May 2011 she delivered the three-day Massey Lecture Series at Harvard, which are serving as the basis of a future book.

This was followed by an appearance at the University of Michigan as part of the Penny W. Stamps lecture series, where she also presented work from her new book.

Personal life

Mann has three children: Emmett, born in 1979, who for a time joined the Peace Corps, Jessie (herself an artist, photographer and model), born in 1981, and Virginia (now a lawyer), born in 1985. Mann lives on a farm in Virginia with her husband, Larry. He is a full-time attorney, and has muscular dystrophy, with progressive weakness.

Mann is passionate about endurance horse racing. In 2006, Mann's horse ruptured an aneurysm while she was riding him. In the horse's death throes, Mann was thrown to the ground and the impact broke her back. It took her two years to recover from the accident and during this time, she made a series of ambrotype self-portraits. These self-portraits were on view for the first time in November 2010 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a part of Sally Mann: the Flesh and the Spirit.

She is currently represented by the Gagosian Gallery of New York City, and the Edwynn Houk Gallery also of New York City. The latter has a show of Mann's works opening September 13, 2012.

Recognition

Her works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of New York City among many others.

Time magazine named Mann "America's Best Photographer" in 2001.Photos she took have appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine twice: first, a picture of her three children for the September 27, 1992 issue with a feature article on her "disturbing work,"and again on September 9. 2001, with a self-portrait (which also included her two daughters) for a theme issue on "Women Looking at Women."

Sally Mann - smoke

http://sallymann.com/selected-works/family-pictures

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Mann

Jan Grover

Still lives of everyday objects 

The postmodern photographer Jan Groover in 1991

Jan Groover (April 24, 1943 – January 1, 2012) was an American photographer who lived for many years in Montpon-Menesterol, France, with her husband, painter and critic Bruce Boice. She was born in Plainfield, New Jersey and died in 2012 at Montpon-Ménestérol, France.

Groover received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1965 from Pratt Institute, and a Master of Arts in 1970 from Ohio State University.

Groover was noted for her use of emerging color technologies. In 1979, Groover began to use platinum/palladium prints for portraits and still lifes, transforming everyday items into beautiful, formal still lifes. In 1987, critic Andy Grundberg noted in the New York Times, "In 1978 an exhibition of her dramatic still-life photographs of objects in her kitchen sink caused a sensation. When one appeared on the cover of Artforum magazine, it was a signal that photography had arrived in the art world - complete with a marketplace to support it."

Groover also used early 20th century camera technology, such as the banquet camera, for elongated, horizontal presentations of otherwise pedestrian items. In a New York Times review of Groover's work exhibited at the Janet Borden Gallery, New York, in 1997, critic Roberta Miller called Groover's work "beautiful and masterly in the extreme."

Jan Groover's work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987, for which an accompanying catalogue was printed. Her work has also been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Still life Research Jan Groover

1978 untitled

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Groover

The follow photographs are inspired by Jan Groover. I took these on the 10th October 2012.

Noreen Butt 2012

Noreen Butt 2012

still life of everyday objects NB 2012

Justin Windle (Still life work)

Justin Windle has been shooting creative commercial photography for over 26 years.

In that time there is almost nothing that he hasn’t shot.

Still life, people, automotive, aerial, room sets, landscape and food in the purpose-built studio or on location – digital or film.

The ability to successfully interpret a brief and manage projects effectively – providing clients with the shot they are looking for – is a key skill honed over time.

Advertising agencies, design groups as well as a wide variety of direct clients have all used Justin to create and consistently deliver quality images.

Studio

Facilities include a newly built studio with over 4,000 sqft of space, located minutes from Manchester city centre and the M60 motorway, the studio is the ideal space to shoot everything from large sets, automotive photography and “overhead” shots right through to simple pack shots and still life.

Justin Windle (still life)

Justin Windle

Irving Penn

Irving Penn was born on June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry Penn and Sonia Greenberg. In 1922, Irving Penn's younger brother, Arthur Penn, was born, who would go on to become a film director and producer.

Irving Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts) from 1934 to 1938, where he studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts under Alexey Brodovitch. While still a student, Penn worked under Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar, where several of Penn's drawings were published.

Irving Penn worked for two years as a freelance designer and making his first amateur photographs before taking Brodovitch's position as the art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before leaving to spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the US.

When Irving Penn returned to New York, Alexander Liberman offered him a position as an associate in the Vogue magazine Art Department, where Penn worked on layout before Liberman asked him to try his hand at photography for the magazine.

Irving Penn photographed his first cover for Vogue magazine in 1943 and continued to work at the magazine throughout his career, shooting covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion, and photographic essays.

In the 1950s, Penn founded his own studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Over the years, Penn's list of clients grew to include General Foods, De Beers, Issey Miyake, and Clinique.

Irving Penn met fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947. In 1950, the two married at Chelsea Register Office, and two years later Lisa gave birth to their son, Tom Penn, who would go on to become a metal designer. Lisa Fonssagrives died in 1992.

Lisa Fonssagrives in later years

Lisa Fonssagrives 1947

Irving Penn died aged 92 on October 7, 2009 at his home in Manhattan.

Photography

While perhaps best known for his fashion photography, Irving Penn's repertoire also includes portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around the world; Modernist still lifes of food, bones, bottles, metal, found objects, etc.; and stunning scenes from photographic travel essays. That said, his fashion photography is paramount to his career, and his creative eye helped to shape the post-World War II feminine chic and glamour photography of the mid-twentieth century.

Yves-Saint-Laurent 1993

Alfred Hitchcock

Penn was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky.

Penn's still life compositions are skillfully arranged assemblages of food or objects—at once spare and highly-organized, the objects articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. All of Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. 

Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth and maturity that untoned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp feel.

Cult Cream

While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured beyond creative boundaries. The exhibition of Earthly Bodies consisted of series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949-1950, they were not put on exhibit until 1980, perhaps in part because of questions about the public reception of the graphic representations of the female nude.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Penn

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