Mona Kuhn

Mona Kuhn is a German photographer from Brazil. She graduated from The Ohio State University in 1996 and studied at the Art Institute of San Francisco after. Last semester Shane showed me her work and I drew a lot of inspiration from it. Her marriage of light and the human form is something I would like to recreate in my developing series. The series I draw the most inspiration from is called Evidence and the images below come from it. This spring she released a book named Private that features very deliberate parings of portraits and landscapes or detail shots. Lately I have been really interested in exploring nature and all it's beauty that I've been overlooking for far too long. My current idea for this series is to photograph individuals within these incredibly beautiful places. Looks like I need to go exploring.

               

http://www.monakuhn.com/

Christian Werner

      Christian Werner is documenting the darkness of war and sickness. Every photo is so deep with meaning which is what makes them interesting. The photos are taken in black and white so there is a lot of contrast between tones. One photo is depicting a stone table with what appears to be blood dripping down the side, which is actually water, with two still born children on top of it. They look so dwarfed by the large table used to wash off the dead before they are buried. There is a keen attention to how much and where the light is placed in each photo accenting or hiding things in the frame. The next photo is of a still born child's hand barley showing from under a white cloth. The light shows off the cloth while the shadow shows the viewer the lifelessness of this small hand. Conceptually I enjoy the heavy subject of showing how a toxic chemical can effect so many people especially the young and innocent. Even though the subject mater is dark there is a bit of light shown from people helping console the living and respecting the dead.

Christopher Anderson

Ideas/Concepts- While I would like to continue on with my abstraction series, I also either wanna start a series of portraits on one of a couple possible topics, or continue with the film stills project from a few years ago.



Christopher Anderson is a photographer from Texas that currently works as a photographer in The New Yorker magazine and has worked for National Geographic and Newsweek
He uses light, color, and heavy contrast very well and often times in great unison. He has a style to his portraiture that intrigues me because of his use of bright muted tones in his color portraits, and his stark contrast in his black and white ones. Ive also noticed that he tends to use a colored background which I believe helps ad to the uniqueness of his style.

640 × 420 - vicemag.tumblr.com

Katie Orlinsky

New York photographer, Katie Orlinsky, has been documenting the lives of people around the world. The photographs above are from her projects The Third Gender, Innocence Assassinated: the living victims of Mexico's drug war, Prison Portraits: the Ciudad Juarez women's prison, The Aqualillies, and a photograph of Saul Armendariz, the gay drag lucha libre wrestler in Mexico. Her photographs are windows into the lives of many groups of people. Orlinsky gives coverage to war, gender, oppression, and expression. She has a diverse portfolio that is expanding with portraits and snapshots of her global travels in dangerous places. Her work gives a voice to sex workers in Nepal, earthquake survivors in Chile and Haiti, women and children in war zone Gaza and Jerusalem, and others. Katie Orlinsky is an inspiration as she brings our awareness to the realities of other peoples lives.

Ideas | Inspiration

Over the weekend, I've been brainstorming ideas and ways to accomplish the series that I have in mind for this class. I will definitely be building or starting off from the series that I did for my photography 3 class last semester. I've been continuing my normal routine of looking through different blogs of different photographers, seeking inspiration. My next step in my process would be looking for different areas and models, that fit my vision, for my series.

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Andre Wagner:

Andre Wagner is a photographer from Brooklyn, NY. His passions are street and documentary photography. Andre uses his work to capture human conditions in a raw way, and to preserve the sensitive moments of life. He likes to shoot in film because he says shooting different individuals from different backgrounds are just as unpredictable as the film. He believes that his work should make you feel something, and if there is anything less than that, it won't work. I find inspiration in his work because I've always wanted to experiment in street photography. Yes, some of his photographs are very candid, but there is still much meaning to them, and they speak volumes. I also appreciate that he puts majority of his work in black and white. I believe that if he decided to keep them in color, I wouldn't get that feeling that he wants his viewers to have. His work is raw, but I sense a feeling of intimacy. You can see that he's very comfortable with what he does.

Over this weekend I will be doing research on how to properly use a green screen.  I wish to learn how to create a background and merge the foreground together. As for my project I may be working with either horror or fantasy style.  I want to create a different world with possible special effects.  I have been contemplating on continuing a previous project or start a completely new one.

Whats In Store

For this semester I want to continue to build on the work I did in photo 3. For this weekend I am taking a trip to the mountains and I figured this would be a great opportunity to photography more tableaus for my series. I plan on using women as my subject matter like most of my previous photos have have. I might use males in the photos to add an element of tension. As usual I will be looking for places of interest and that have unique lighting situations. Hopefully while I am taking pictures this week I will come up with something that tie my series together.