Robert Adams has been one of my favorite photographers and photography critics ever since my college photo teacher introduced me to him about six years ago. He has written books, including Beauty in Photography and Why People Photograph that have served as, and to which I turn regularly for, a great inspiration and influence on my photography.

Useful Links:
Getty Museum
PBS Art 21 Documentary Bio
New Topographics Wikipedia Entry

James Hajicek and Carol Panaro-Smith collaborate in making photograms of plants, “photogenic drawings” using very much the same techniques and chemical formulas William Henry Fox Talbot used.

Plants that we either dug from the earth or collected from the sea are exposed in contact with hand-coated light sensitive paper. This organic material withers under the intense heat and light of the Arizona sun as it completes its final act of participation in the creation of its own image.

As opposed to using commercially made photo paper like Jerry Burchfield, the duo hand-coats paper with light sensitive chemistry:

As we continued to work with variations of William Henry Fox Talbot’s basic chemical formulas, we discovered that altering the variables of the light sensitive solutions, the chemistry in the paper, the intensity and accompanying heat of the light, and the chemicals emerging from the organic material, a color palette and physical presence emerged in the final print creating an ‘organic artifact’ beyond the imagination of anything previously thought of as photographic

Useful Links:

Artist Website

Photo Eye Gallery

Watermark Fine Art Gallery

This week I’m digging into the past, and presenting Carleton Watkins. I have always been fascinated with History. When I was registering and deciding on a major for college I was deciding between History and Photography. I chose photography, and the rest, as they say, is, well, history. So it is only natural for me to have a keen interest in the history of photography. Some of my favorite processes for my own photography are historic/alternative processes, i.e., carbon printing, cyanotypes, etc…

Many of the first photographs people see of the Yosemite Valley are those done by Ansel Adams. Indeed, they are very beautiful photographs of a very beautiful place, and still rank among my most favorite photographs. I recall the first time I saw a Carleton Watkins photograph in my History of Photography class in college, I thought I was looking at an Ansel Adams photograph.

After moving to San Jose from New York, and later moved to San Francisco, Watkins began photographing the Yosemite Valley as official photographer for the California State Geological Survey, using both a mammoth camera and a stereo camera.

Maybe it’s from my fascination with history, or my affinity for the aesthetic of an albumen print from a wet plate collodion negative, but Watkins photographs of Yosemite, specifically, and other photographs, his photographs have surpassed those of Adams for me, in terms of who I prefer.

Useful Links:

CarletonWatkins.org

National Gallery of Art

Getty Museum

In Focus: Carleton Watkins

Wikipedia

Useful Links:

Personal Site

Rokeby Gallery

For the past seven years Sze Tsung Leong has been carrying out a still on-going project entitled “Horizons” depicting a wide variety of landscapes from around the world: locations range from Mexico City, to Iceland, to California, to Cairo. The horizon lies in the same position from photograph to photograph, thus creating the sense of a longer, wider landscape, despite them being from different parts of the world, and contain different subject matter, though photographs of cities really give the sense of the photographs being a multi-panel panoramic photograph of the same city.

Useful Links:

Personal Website

Horizons Exhibit Review

I really like the simple compositions and simple color palette in Matthieu Gafsou’s body of work “Surfaces.” The landscape is that of Tunisia, and the body of work treats the issues of a new tradition, culture, and architecture subverting those of former traditions.

All of the text on his website is in french, so unless you understand the language, you’ll have to plug it into Google Translate, though the text for Surfaces is in a jpg image, so it’s a little more complicated.

Useful Links:

Personal Site

This week I didn’t look for/at many photographers. I spent much of the time during my evenings trying to get through a paper called “The Machine in the Garden Revisited - American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics” by Deborah Bright, whose writings I enjoy more than her photography, despite her images and the concepts behind the imagery being interesting in itself.

The Machine in the Garden is about the relations between landscape photography’s aesthetics and environmental politics. It was a pretty heavy read - I’ll have to sit down with it again on a day when I can read the whole thing at once. It was all very interesting nonetheless.

Useful Links:

Personal Site

The Machine in the Garden Revisited Direct Download (opens .pdf document)

Other Essays

The photographs in Theron Humphrey’s This Land is Our Land body of work are ones I find very relevant to my Urban Landscape photographs of parks. Humphrey’s photographs are landscape photographs, but like my parks photographs, are photographs of landscaping.

 

Landscape is a symbolic construction of certain social classes and how they signify their relationship to nature and communicate their social roles to others.

His predominantly blue and green color pallet and harsh mid-day light are two big things that really attract me to his photographs.

Useful Links:

Personal Site

Recently Wordpress released a version update and last night I tried to update my installation. Somehow it caused the url www.52photographers.com to redirect to www.andydduncan.com. I ended up having to reinstall the whole installation. I was able to back up my database, but now I can’t import the back up into the present install without it giving a blank home page and it giving me an error that I don’t have permissions to access the admin sections. My only option I think is to start fresh unfortunately. The previous template was lost so I’ve had to search for a new one, hence the different appearance. This has all been really frustrating, and I hate to lose the old posts. I have them saved (minus Scott’s post on Beatte Gutschow, which was an excellent post; it really exemplified what I want this blog to be), so I may be able to re-post them that way.

English-born photographer Tom White originally wanted to be a painter, but took a strong interest in photography and works as a freelance photographer in New Jersey, where he now resides. He went to the International Center for Photography where he studied journalism and documentary photography. I especially like his American Landscapes project, which depicts how man shapes his environment and the landscape: building roads, constructing billboards, gas stations, and railways. The long exposures of the landscapes obscure any evidence of people being in the frame: brake lights and headlights streak through the image, people walking are blurred.

His portrait and street photographs are particularly interesting as well. Many of these photographs are of homeless people, sometimes juxtaposing two ends of the income scale.

Useful Links:

Personal Site