Lee Miller
Lee Miller was born in 1907, New York. She was an American photographer. When she was young, she was photographed constantly by her father, Theodore Miller. When she was seven years old, she was raped while staying with a family friend in Brooklyn and infected with gonorrhea. In 1929, Miller traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Ray taught her how to master lighting, printing and the process of 'solarization' - a way of reversing highlights into blacks. After leaving Man Ray and Paris in 1932, she returned to New York and established a portrait and commercial photography studio with her brother Erik as her darkroom assistant. During this year she was included in the Modern European Photography exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. During the second War, Miller photographed dying children in a Vienna Hospital, peasant life in post-war Hungary, and finally, the execution of Prime Minister László Bárdossy. After the war, she continued to work for Vogue for a further two years, covering fashion and celebrities.
Lee Miller is best known for her surrealist photographs which speak in the language of poetic metaphors. Similar to fashion photography and quite opposite photojournalism, her surrealist work intentionally and intelligently offer invading objects that occupy her photographic space. In some ways, this is surrealism because it is not true documentary.
In the mid-30s, Miller married Aziz Eloui Bey and together they moved to Egypt. Eloui encouraged her to explore the country and while doing so she captured exceptional images of the desert. Her work at that time focused on nature and architecture, rather than on human forms, though she did photograph her husband’s friends from time-to-time. In this photography, the desert landscape was demonstrated through Miller's point of view, the contrast of broken cloth and the desert landscape can be seen as the inside and outside world, it expresses a kind of desolation.
Miller was responsible for capturing some of the first photographs after the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany at the end of the war. Miller was able to incorporate her Surrealist photographic training to reveal the horrifying realities of war and the true scale of the concentration and extermination camps. Though such a serious topic, her artistic talents reached their heights capturing the chaos of this devastating war.
Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923 in New York. She learned photography from her husband Allan Arbus. They found success with fashion work, but Diane soon branched out on her own. She committed suicide in New York City in 1971. Diane Arbus is best known for her square-format photographs of marganlized people in society — including transgender people, dwarfs, nudists, circus people. Although she has always expressed love for her subjects, her work has always been controversial and critiqued heavily by art critics and the general public for simply being “the photographer of freaks” and casting her subjects in a negative light.
Describes the focus of Arbus' works in 3 words: Taboo, Unconventional, Beauty.
Some negative attention of Arbus' work:
- Argues that Arbus's work is based on 'distance, on privilege'
- The intensions were more cruel then tender.
- Angered at the lack of political engagement.
- Believed that the subjects had no value.
Some positive attention of Arbus's:
- Sandra Phillips believed that: She was a great humanist photographer who was at the forefront of a new kind of photographic art.
Arbus's images that represented sexually ambiguous figures and motherhood. It challenged dominant social and ideological conventions of the late 1950s' and 60s'.
Nan Golding
Nancy "Nan" Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American photographer. She lives and works in New York, Berlin,, and Paris.She is known for her work, which usually features LGBT-related themes, images or public figures.
Nan Goldin’s richly colored snapshots capture a world that is universally human yet highly personal. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a filmic slideshow, presents hundreds of intense, intimate moments from Goldin’s life in New York during the 1970s and ‘80s—the artist in bed with her lover, drag queens kissing in bars, a man suffering from HIV. While Goldin, now recognized as a pioneer of diaristic photography, documents with unflinching candor a society ravaged by AIDS, drug addiction, and abuse, it is the empathy reflected in these images that imbue them with a remarkable lyricism. Unlike the cool detachment of documentary photography, taking pictures for Goldin is “a way of touching someone—a form of tenderness.” However, Nan's images challenge the traditional gender type by photographing things that aren't usually photographed.
Maple was born in 1986 to an Iranian Muslim mother and English Christian raised father. She studied Fine Art at Kingston University.
Sarah’s work is centered on two main themes: women who assert themselves and the Islam. Her approach is always provocative and she plays various roles in order to find the perfect positioning.
No comments:
Post a Comment