Camera Lucida Response

Overall the book Camera Lucida was a good read, but there was one part in particular that stood out to me. It is on page 63 and 64, when the author is looking through pictures of his mother, shortly after she died. He mentioned how if he showed these to friends, these photographs wouldn't really "speak" to them. However, they would always "speak" to him, for he had a personal and close connection to the subject. This made me think of what kind of photographs spoke to me. Of course ones of family members and friends will always speak to me but there are photographs of people I may not know, but when I look at them, they move me and make me feel something inside. An example of this is a series that was done by Barbra Davidson on gang violence in Los Angeles. The series recently won her the Pulitzer Prize, which goes to show how much these photographs spoke to the viewers, including me.
http://framework.latimes.com/who-we-are/barbara-davidson/

Artist Presentation- Gustave Le Gray

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AXfRcWoY0-VrZGNjY2RrZm5fMzJmNnQ1Y25jZw&hl=en_US&authkey=CIT-67cN

Cultural Event #3

ArtRAGEous Art Show

            The student led group, RAGE (Rape Awareness and Gender Education) here at the University of Denver, is a group whose goal is to educate the DU community about sexual assault, rape, and gender identity. They recently organized and hosted an art show in the Driscoll gallery here on the DU campus, called ArtRAGEous. The mission of the show was to exhibit student art that expressed that artist’s rage about topics relating to rape, sexual assault, gender issues, and body image. The art was done by DU students and was open to all forms such as photography, painting, drawing and sculpture. I decided to not only attend the opening, but also submit a piece of my own, a photograph.  At the opening, there were many interesting works of art, but there was one piece that stood out to me, which I am going to compare and contrast to my photograph that was in the show.

            The first piece, my piece, was a 13”x 11” color photograph. With this photograph, I choose to express my rage about body image and the way women are constantly told they need to be skinny and perfect by the media. The subject of my photograph is a Caucasian woman. The only part of her that is shown in the photograph is her stomach and chest area, with the main area of concentration being on her stomach. The stomach is exceptionally skinny looking, with her skin stretching tight across her ribs and her waist concaved inward. The woman is lying down on top of a bed of Cosmopolitan and Seventeen magazines, all of which are addressed to women and young girls. On the front of the magazine’s there are cover stories on how to achieve your “perfect body” such as, “Get Your Best Body Ever!”, “Flatten Your Belly”,  “Look Cute Now”, “Curb Your Cravings”, “Lose Weight While You Eat”, and “Flatten Your Abs Fast”. The photograph grabs your attention, with the bright colors from the magazine and the emancipated looking body in the center.

            The next work of art, done by an anonymous artist, is also a color photograph and similar to the previous one has a woman as the main content. The woman is Latino and unlike my photograph, her face is visible and she is staring directly at the camera with a seductive look in her eye. It is a powerful gaze, enforcing the message the picture is trying to portray; the message of dismissing shame of one’s body and self-image. To support this message, the artist has written across the woman’s bare chest the words, “Caress My Chaos”. The woman is wearing a vibrant red cloth around her breasts and her hands are up in her hair, which is unruly and framing her face.

            The two photographs are similar because they express their rage about body image and use the female body to express this rage. They both use words as an aid to enforce their messages, yet the ways these words are shown in the pictures are different, for one is written on the body and the other on magazine covers surrounding the body. They are also different in the amount of body that is shown. In my work of art, I choose not to include the face of the woman so her body could represent all women who feel the pressure our media puts on our culture to be skinny and perfect. When the artist included the woman’s face in the second photograph, it became more personal and more about the story behind the woman in the photo. This exhibit was interesting to go to not only as a viewer, but also as an artist in the show, for I was able to find interesting comparisons between my photograph with other works of art there and see how powerful messages can be portrayed through art.             

Blurb Book on Scar Series

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2181771

Significant Others

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hannabradbury/sets/72157626580730596/

Culture Event #2- RedLine Gallery

On a recent outing to the RedLine Gallery, here in Denver CO, I found myself being pleasantly surprised with the vast amount of work that was featured there, each one evidence of talented local artists. RedLine is a non-profit art gallery that’s mission is to connect artists with the community. It allows artists to present their artwork to the public and even houses studios for artists to come work out of. They are currently serving as the main gallery for the Month of Photography here in Denver, with three unique exhibitions; Thought Objects, Discoveries, and Modern Alternative. There was a broad spectrum of subject matter and styles from artist to artist, varying from a photograph of a little city made of Jello, to a collage of old pornographic magazine covers. Among all the work featured there, two photographs really caught my eye and drew my attention in from across the room.

            The first photograph was a black and white one by artist Tina Kazakhishvili called, Untitled. The subject in the photograph is a naked woman sitting with her back to the camera on a bed. She is leaning to her left, but it appears there is a large gust of wind that is sweeping her long dark hair up to the right, exposing her bare back. The hair in this photo is what demands the most attention and in my opinion makes the photograph as powerful as it is. It seems the photographer has caught that perfect moment; that moment that every photographer desires to capture, with the hair blowing gracefully out to the side. Even though the content in this photograph is rather simple, with just the single women in it, and with a plain white background, it expresses a great deal of secrecy through her body position, with her back to us and the flight of her hair. I find myself wanting to know what her face looks like and what caused this great gust of air to come sweeping through her hair.

            The next piece was part of a series done by Judy Haberl, called Hidden Agendas Unutterable. There were four photographs that made up the series, but I will focus on one in particular, Purse 6. The subject of this color photograph is a close up of a translucent lady’s purse or “clutch” that has been placed against a white background. Inside this purse, it appears that liquid has been frozen and in the frozen liquid is a black hand grenade and a pearl necklace, which is slightly wrapped around the grenade. These objects within the purse are two complete opposites, which is what caught my attention and drew me to this piece. The grenade is very masculine and associated with war, explosions, and death and the pearl necklace is very feminine and is seen paired with beautiful dresses or other formal wear and associated with wealth, yet they are seen close together, concealed in a woman’s purse. This is extremely interesting to me and I find myself forming my own interpretation of who the owner of this purse is and the story behind why she is hiding a grenade in her purse.

            The apparent differences between these two photographs are that the first is in black and white and that the second one is in color, and the subject in the first one is human and the subject in the second photograph is an object. The two are similar in the sense of mystery they portray. There is mystery in the first picture because the woman’s back is to the camera, hiding her face and making her anonymous to the viewer. The second one brings about a sense of mystery through the placement of contradictory objects inside a purse, making the viewer curious as to why these objects are together and who the unknown owner of them is. Both photographers did a good job at conveying this sense of mystery, for it is what attracted me to both their photographs and kept me intrigued and wanting to know while I was observing them.

Fingerprint Photograph

Adorned

Photo project for my 2-D art class.
To see entire series follow the link to Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hannabradbury/sets/72157626393939233/

Fortune Cookie- "No man is a failure who is enjoying life."

Sense of Self Assignment

Link to Flickr for more images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hannabradbury/5601414152/in/photostream

Movie Response- Our Feelings Took The Pictures

The documentary Our Feelings Took The Pictures is about a group of women from all different cities in Iraq who come together for a photography project. British photojournalist, Eugenie Dolberg, organized the workshop with the hope in mind that these Iraqi women would then go back and document the war with more intimacy. She, an assistant, and these 12 women, lived in a house together and every day would go out on the streets of Iraq and photograph what they saw. Most of these women have never taken a picture before, let alone handle a camera so it was all a new experience for them, but definitely a life changing one.  When they weren't photographing, they were working on photography related projects, such as life graphs. When presented, these very personal life graphs relieved heartbreaking stories from each woman, all brought on my the war. There were stories of death of their family members, personal experiences of kidnappings, and bombings of their village. This film showed how these women could use these past experiences to go out and use pictures to communicate what was happening to them and to people like them, because of the war. All in all this was a very moving film and really showed a different take on how personal histories and photography can intertwine.

Paradigm Shift- Graduation

On May 29, 2010, I sat in a dress and heels in my high school gym with a cap on my head and a smile on my face. Today was the day I had been waiting for for a long time now. It was the day I would finally walk up on that stage and be handed my diploma. I sat there excited but also extremely nostalgic for what I would be leaving behind. My high school years were my glory years. I had discovered dance, had a great, loving group of friends, supportive teachers, and was all around living a content life. Sitting there in that hot stuffy gym I pictured where I would be a year from now and if I would be as happy as I was then. I'd be off to college in the next couple of months and had no idea what would be in store for me there. It was scary knowing that I would be leaving this great life I have behind for something I would be facing totally alone with friends and family miles and miles away. As I walked up on that stage, took my diploma into my hands and turned to smile at the crowd I knew that if I had made it this far, I would be just fine for what was to come.

Topics and People of Photography

        Camera Obscura: This was one of the inventions that later led to photography. It is a box or room with a hole on one side that lets light in which then strikes a surface inside where it is reproduced, upside-down, but with color and perspective preserved. The image can be projected onto paper, and can then be traced to produce a highly accurate representation. This was used and studied for many years by the Chinese and eventually lead to the invention of the pinhole camera. 

        Johann Heinrich Schulze: In 1727, photography was still being experimented with and chemicals were being tested to see which ones were working the best with prints. It was known that certain chemicals darken when exposed to the sun, it was not clear whether it was the action of light or heat which had this effect. Schulze discovered silver salts by leaving a bottle filled with chalk, silver and nitric-acid by a window, which because of the sunlight turned the chemicals on the exposed side a darker colour. Schulze then attached paper stencils to the outside of another glass enabling the covered areas to remain white and the uncovered areas to darken. 

        Thomas Wedgwood: Wedgwood was the first man to think of and develop a method to copy visible images chemically to permanent media. His father was a potter so he got the idea to use ceramic pots coated with silver nitrate as well as treated paper and white leather as media of print. This proved to not be entirely successful so he later went back and revised his methods. His final result was a method of chemically staining an object's silhouette to paper by coating the paper with silver nitrate and exposing the paper, with the object on top, to natural light, then preserving it in a dark room. 

        Nicephore Niepce: Niepce was always experimenting with things so when lithography came about, he began testing out it's abilities. Working with a camera obscura, he dissolved bitumen in lavender oil and coated the sheet of pewter with this light capturing mixture. He then placed the sheet inside a camera obscura to capture the picture, and eight hours later took it out and washed it with lavender oil to get rid of the unexposed bitumen. Thus the first photograph! 

       Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre: Partnering with Niepce was a man by the name of Daguerre. Along with Niepce, they redefined the process of making photographs. Daguerre first exposed silver-coated copper plates to iodine and then he exposed them to light for several minutes, coated the plate with mercury vapor heated to 75° Celsius and finally fixing the image in salt water. The result was a plate with a mirror image of the scene. These ideas led to the famous Daguerreotype term.

       William Henry Fox Talbot: Talbot is famous inventing the calotype process. This process was a refinement of this process where the negative paper direct image was printed onto a sensitised sheet placed underneath. The negative meant that the print could be reproduced as many times as was required.

        Hill and Adamson: Around 1840, two men by the names of David Hill and Robert Adamson, produced the first body of photography work. They made a great team with Hill composing each photograph and Adamson operating the camera and working with the chemicals. They used Talbot's calotype method and over the course of four years they produced nearly 3,000 images. These photographs made up a body of work that still ranks among the highest achievements of photographic portraiture.

David Hill

Robert Adamson

        Julia Margaret Cameron: Although she began her photography career late, at the age of 48, Cameron is very famously known for photographing many influentials figures during that time. This includes: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. These portraits she did were known for being cropped closely around the subjects face and for having a slight blur about them due to a long exposure time. 

        Felix Nadar: Nadar was a journalist, writer and artist, but most commonly known for being a daredevil with the camera. He was the first photographer in France to take pictures underground or in dark places using artificial light. He was also the first photographer to take ariel pictures using a hot air ballon and flying high above the streets of Paris with his camera. 

Rotating Self-Portrait 

        Scott Archer: Archer began his career making sculptures, mainly of people, which then lead to his interest in photography to help aid him with his portrait sculptures. Learning the calotype process, he experimented with collodion trying to reduce the amount of texture and unevenness inherent in the paper. He devoted all his time on photography now, which paid off in 1849, when he made the discovery of coating a glass plate with iodized collodion and exposing it while still wet, a process that finally worked. 

Dr. Richard Maddox: Dr Richard Maddox discovered a method of using gelatin instead of glass as the plate material for the light-sensitive solution. This discovery led to the invention of dry plate photography, a less cumbersome process that did not require the photographer to use a darkroom tent for immediate plate development as had been required by wet plate processes.

George Eastman: In 1884, Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable; in 1888 he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film. In 1892, he established the Eastman Kodak Company, in Rochester, New York, one of the first firms to mass-produce standardized photography equipment. This company also manufactured the flexible transparent film, devised by Eastman in 1889, which proved vital to the subsequent development of the motion picture industry.

Cultural Event #1

This quarter we have been presented with many great speakers, including Jennifer Karady, a photographer I had not heard of before, but quickly learned she was the artist with the exhibit in the Myhren Gallery here at Denver University. When she spoke to us about her featured body of work, In Country: Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan, it sounded very intriguing so without any hesitation I went to the event opening on March 31.

Jennifer Karady is a photographer based out of New York City, but travels the country in search of pictures with stories. Her latest project has been working with American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to create photographs that tell these soldiers war stories as well as their process of adjusting back into civilian life and some of the difficulties they may face. At the exhibit opening she talked about how after she was introduced to these veterans, she worked closely with them, getting to know them, gaining their trust and listening to them as they opened up to her with their war stories. Once this introduction process is complete both Karady and the veteran decide on one story specifically they want to reenact through a photograph. Karady then stages a photo shoot, which the actual veteran and those who are close to him or her, such as family and friends, are placed in this reenactment scene, which then Karady photographs and prints.

When I first walked into the gallery where this collection was hanging, the photographs seemed to jump off the wall at me. They were quite large, 48x48 inches, and very colorful. The one that drew me in the most was her photograph of a young man in full soldier gear ducking behind a pile of garbage on a street in New York City with his hands over his ears. Behind him, driving down the street is a garbage truck approaching a pothole. In a statement by the soldier next to the picture he describes how when he was at war a mortar hit his convoy and he was injured. After coming back to America, he has realized that the sound of a garbage truck, or any large truck hitting a pothole makes the same sound as a mortar exploding, causing him to run and duck behind anything that serves as a barrier on the streets. The reason that I liked this photograph is because Karady was able to really capture the fear this soldier is feeling which is crucial for a photographer and makes a picture that much better if strong emotions are achieved within the shot. The pained and freighted expression on his face shows the mind-set that many soldiers feel after returning home from a place that only they will really know how horrible can be. Because many of us will never know what soldiers experience while at war, Jennifer Karady is presenting through a powerful series of photographs, the mental and physical impact the war has on these men and women and how it compromises them and those around them when returning home. The exhibition In Country: Soldiers’ Stories from Iraq and Afghanistan is a display that I walked away from not only inspired to bring meaning to my own photography, but also with better knowledge of the hardships veterans face even after war. 

Letter to a Photograph

Dear picture of my family,

Look at your beautiful smiling faces. You were a happy couple, in love with not only each other but also your brand new baby girl. Who would of thought by looking at this picture that these same two people would end up growing apart and soon those big happy smiles brought on by each other would instead appear only for other reasons. The love radiating from this picture faded as well but was replaced by a different love; a love that was maintained by two main things: your children, and boy howdy you both sure did focus your love there. I grew up in a nothing but loving home, even though my home was split, just as you two eventually did. At first this split angered me for I wanted my family all together and happy again, just like in this photograph. With time though my broken family healed, as well as my broken heart. We fell into a routine as a split family and soon these smiles were shared once again between you two over birthday dinners, sporting events, and the dropping off and picking up of my brother and I every other weekend. One would sometimes not even know you two were divorced, with the hugs you share and the small talk that's exchanged. We have gone through some changes, but I believe it was all for the better. You two mean the world to me and as far as I am concerned, I still have this same happy family you see here in the picture.

Love,

The baby in blue. 

Sense of Place Photographs