Tim Hetherington

Tim Hetherington was a British – American photo journalist, who was born in 5 December 1970 and he passed away in 20 April 2011 while covering the conflict in Misrata, Libya. He was best known for his work in Afghanistan, much of it shot for Vanity Fair. In 2007, he won the much sought-after World Press Photo of the Year for his coverage of American soldiers in the Korengal Valley-one of four World Press Prizes he received. His film Restrepo, which he co-directed with Sebastian Junger about a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan, was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 for Best Documentary Feature.Tim Hetherington photographed the experience of war from the perspective of the individual, mostly in West Africa and the Middle East.

Through his photographs, writing and films, Tim gave us new ways to look at and think about human suffering. Shortly after graduation he received £5,000 from his grandmother's will, which enabled him to travel for two years in India, China and Tibet. That trip made him realize he "wanted to make images", so he "worked for three to four years, going to night school in photography before eventually going back to college." He then studied photojournalism under Daniel Meadows and Colin Jacobson in Cardiff in 1996. 

Bibliography
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-DjqR6OucBc

http://www.timhetherington.com/

http://www.timh-images.com/

Sam Taylor Wood



Sam Taylor Wood, who was born in 4 March, 1967 in Croydon, England is an English photographer and film maker. She began exhibiting her fine art photography in the early – 1990s. One alliance with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor Wood reinterpreting the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon by photographer Annie Liebovitz only a few hours before Lennon was assassinated in 1980.

Taylor Wood’s work examines the split between being and appearance, often placing her human subjects – either singly or in groups – in situations where the line between interior and external sense of self is in conflict. Her languid and silent film portrait of David Beckham, for example, which was shot in a single take, offers a serene alternative to this most intensively photographed celebrity.

Taylor-Wood has also explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid-air without the aid of any visible support.

Bibliography

http://whitecube.com/artists/sam_taylor-wood/

http://artforexample.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/video-art-and-va-va-voom.html



Celebrities and Advertisement

Dr Dre endorsing his 'Dr Dre Beats Headphones'

Celebrities and advertising go hand in hand nowadays. Anything celebrities endorse or use themselves, we; general public seem to want to have that product. In a way fashion dictates us, people want to look attractive, it’s not just because they want to look beautiful or attract opposite sex also because for self-confidence and morale. So people think that whatever celebrities recommend are always of high standard and look pretty, but it isn’t always the case. For consumers when a product is endorsed by a celebrity price automatically becomes secondary, getting their hands on that product becomes primary. Because of this fact, many celebrities are producing their own range of products ranging from headphones to fashion wear, footwear and many more. Just by having their brand name can make an ordinary object extra ordinary and there are people who are taking benefit from it and we consumers aren’t realising the their true intention.

Polaroid appointed Lady Gaga as their Managing Director reason being if she’s on-board, she will help to boost their sales figure and gain more attention in public as well as in media. Adverts leads to greater sale but not anymore because of the recession people are more aware and think twice before they dig deep into their pockets. Here is a recent report that all is not well in the celebrity marketing industry;

2010's Worst Celebrity TV Ads by Negative Lift (Sink)
	Celebrity	Brand	Ad Title	Lift
1	Tiger Woods	Nike	Did You Learn Anything?	-30%
2	Lance Armstrong	Radio Shack	No Emoticons	-28%
3	Kenny Mayne	Gillette	Good Segment	-28%
4	Dale Earnhardt Jr.	Nationwide Auto Insurance	Coverage at the Right Price	-27%
5	Donald Trump	Macy's	Making Timmy a Mogul	-24%

Bibliography
http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2011/02/celebrities-in-advertising-a-marketing-mistake.html

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is an American photographer who was born in Washington, D.C. on September 12, 1953. After her sister’s suicide in 1965, Nan Goldin took up photography. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978. Her works are often presented in the form of slideshow. The main themes of her early pictures were love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. Goldin said in a YouTube clip that she went to a school based on Summerhill, England which is a free school where people were running naked and at that point she became obsessed with taking pictures.

By 1988, Goldin's drug and alcohol abuse had begun to take a toll on her life and work, and she entered a detoxification clinic. Though she had previously experimented with self-portraiture, it was in this clinic that she created many images of herself. Photographs such as ‘My Bedroom at the Lodge’, ‘Self-portrait in front of clinic’, and ‘Self-portrait with milagro’ reveal an introspective Goldin, somewhat humbled by her experiences at the hospital.

Bibliography

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwISjOF8k8c

http://www.biography.com/people/nan-goldin-40567

http://www.art-directory.info/photography/nan-goldin-1953/

Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore is an American photographer who was born on October 8, 1947 in New York City. He was interested in photography since his early age. In 1971, at the age of 24, Shore became the second living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was known for his expressionless images and dull scenes and objects. Shore mainly works on colour photography at the time in the 70s where only serious art photographers saw the world in black and white.

The series 'American Surfaces' shows what Shores has explored during his travel across the states where he keeps a visual diary and photographs whatever he could find like people he meets, food he eats, the houses he comes across, the beds he slept in, store windows, art on walls, etc. and people started appearing less in his photographs. Stephen Shore was the first person to use high format piece of work and blow them unto high dimensions.




Bibliography

http://www.303gallery.com/artists/stephen_shore/index.php?p=bio

http://photography.about.com/od/famousphotogbiospz/a/Stephen-Shore-Biography.htm

Ori Gersht

Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 and is currently based in United Kingdom. Ori Gersht engages the grand themes of life, death, violence, and beauty. His photographs and films of the past two decades transcribe images of sites of historical significance the Judean Desert, Sarajevo, Auschwitz, the Galicia region of Ukraine, the Lister Route in the Pyrenees into ciphers of psychological disruption. Such scenes may not seem out of the ordinary unto themselves, but, through the artist’s focused attention and treatment they evoke the emotional resonance of what has transpired—most often, violence, and, more significantly, the ghosts of war’s most egregious detritus, its refugees.

Recently he had his work exhibited at Imperial War Museum titled ‘This Storm is What We Call Progress.’ The title of the exhibition is taken from an essay by German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. This exhibition brings together three new bodies of work by Ori Gersht, each reflecting on events that occurred during the Second World War. Some of his works exhibited at the exhibition were; against the tide: isolated 2010, chasing good fortune: in Japan, series of photographs.



Bibliography
http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/ori-gersht-this-storm-is-what-we-call-progress

http://crggallery.com/artists/ori-gersht/bio/

Modernism / Postmodernism

Example of modernism photography

example of postmodernism photography

Modernism is an art movement that started in 1890s and lasted till about 1945 and postmodernism; as the name suggests followed modernism and was another art movement, which began after the Second World War. Modernism was based on using rational, logical means to gain knowledge while postmodernism denied the application of logical thinking. Postmodernism is often branded as critique of modernism. Postmodernism was a part of a cultural shift which was not only felt in arts but also in other areas such as science, philosophy. Modernism attempts to construct a logical world-view whereas postmodernism attempts to remove the difference between high and low. The term postmodernism is used in a confusing variety of ways. For some it means anti–modern, while for others it means the revision of modernist premises. The seemingly anti–modern stance involves a basic rejection of the beliefs of modernism, such as belief in the supremacy of reason, the notion of truth, and the idea that it is possible through the application of reason and truth to create a better society.

Bibliography
http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/modpostmod.html

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/214493.html

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics can be explained as a study of signs, symbols, icons etc. Semiotics can interpret an image into words and makes an image easy to analyse and further break it down. It is a visual language which creates visual communication. It also makes you able to see an image or any piece of art through a different perspective. Semiotics has not been defined nor has any specific rule or way to follow it, but it depends on the way the signs and symbols are viewed and studied.

  At present semiotics; signs, icons are present and used all over the world in different forms; arts, advertisements, posters. As the arts continue to evolve and change, so does semiotics in the arts as well. It is used in the form of signs and icons to express emotion, meaning. Often hidden meanings can also be conveyed through semiotics, which otherwise would have been hard to convey. In case of semiotics in advertisements or in posters, it does have a massive impact on the way we try to select something that we want. In a way it also dictates the way we live because all the signs and symbols make us lead toward a certain direction; their direction.

Bibliography

http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/rhethtml/signifiers/sigsave.html

http://artandperception.com/2007/02/how-useful-is-semiotics-as-a-method-for-analysing-works-of-art.html 

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer, who was born in America in 19^th January 1954. She is best known for her self-portraits. In her self-portraits, she imitates various characters with their own personal personality. Each of her pictures is completely different from one another and that is one of the main strong points of her portraits, which have a story of their own. Her series called ‘The Stills’ (1977-80) was also one of the reasons why she was well known. In this series, she depicts characters of different women.  

In the Untitled Film Stills series, she begins to deal with topics such as eating disorders, insanity and death, focusing on the consequences of society’s stereotyped roles for women rather than upon the roles themselves.

In May 2011, one of Cindy Sherman’s photograph ‘Untitled #96’ was sold for $3.9 million and making it the second most expensive photograph only behind Andreas Gursky’s ‘Rhein II’, which was sold for $4.3 million.

Bibliography

http://www.popphoto.com/news/2011/05/cindy-sherman-print-sells-39-million-auction-highest-ever-photograp

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cindy-sherman-1938/text-artist-biography

IDENTITY

Identity is an important aspect in everyone's life. A person can be identified by his/her origin, gender, race etc.; furthermore our character, personality can even be a part of our identity that identifies us to the world. The way you present your personality is the way you being identified to others. In terms of photography or in general arts, identity of a person can be portrayed in a creative way by recording or taking a picture of some object that represents their character. In this sense, identity doesn’t necessarily have to something physical that defines your nature or something within, it can be anything that you are associated with.

These are some of images that I created for ‘Identity’ couple of years ago. In this series of images, I took a picture of one of my classmate and edited on the computer by adding different effects and incorporating different image on top of the original picture but still making the face stand out. I did this because I wanted to show that even though appearance can be changed or altered but the identity of the person still remains the same; as it used to be.

Bibliography
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO9cyahFtRc

Guest of Cindy Sherman

Guest of Cindy Sherman

Guest of Cindy Sherman is a documentary based on Paul Hasegawa Overacker and Cindy Sherman’s brief relationship. As the title suggests Paul Hasegawa Overacker was like a guest where he gets out as swiftly as he had come into her world because he started thinking that being with her was threatening his identity, which he had built by being a straightforward individual.

 He used to attend and record his experiences at art galleries and presented his views on his show ‘Gallery Beat’ because of his uncanny and strange assessment he won over many people. During that process he also came across one of the most talented artist of that time; Cindy Sherman.

Paul Hasegawa Overacker was an open and honest individual whose work revolved around media on a daily basis whereas Cindy Sherman was exactly opposite; she was media shy and always tried to avoid them. But the thing they had in common was their passion in the field of arts. Even though they contributed to that field in different ways; it was arts that brought them together. Despite their relationship seemed flourishing at the beginning soon cracks started appearing, their relationship was always doomed to fail from the start because of their differing personality. He felt that he was always overshadowed by her and felt uncomfortable.


Bibliography

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUHBmaLlR4

http://www.guestofcindysherman.com/about_guest_of_cindy_sherman.html

Robert Frank

Robert Frank was an American photographer and film maker who was born in 9th November 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland. He then later immigrated to America in 1947. He published a book called ‘The Americans’ in France in 1958 and the following year in America. The book was centred on post war events after Second World War. The book shows the images of America during 1950s. Although the book remains one of the most important photography books, it created controversy when it was published because it changed the classic way of looking into an image; he took images from different perspectives, which was new to people. There were only 83 images in the book; ‘The Americans’ but he actually had about 27,000 images and had to narrow it down just to 83 for the book on his trip around America. In response to Robert Frank’s book, John Szarkowski said; ‘It is difficult to remember how shocking Robert Frank's book was, The pictures took us by ambush then ... He established a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces.’
He also took pictures of Welsh miners. He once said 'Black and white is the vision of hope and despair, this is what I want in my photograph.'


To the world the book showed the deprived and struggling America, which was just recovering from the Second World War. People weren’t expecting the pictures that he took at that time to be associated with America because people dreamt of American Dream, which no longer looked achievable.






Bibliography
http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Robert-Frank.html

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/04/frank200804