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Jodi Taylor
Taylor is mentioned in the course material (EyV p.15) as an example for the first course assignment, the Square Mile. Her work for that assignment is discussed on the OCA's site. The piece states, "these pictures were shot on 35mm colour film and printed as 6×4’s, presented in a cheap and flimsy black album, very much in keeping with what would have been the norm for working class families in the 80’s and 90’s" and goes on to comment, "Technically they are well composed … The colours are aesthetically pleasing."
While these comments may well be true, it is significant that they are presented as a series of "snaps" and that raises some interesting points. They could be evidence in a neighbours' dispute, or slipped equally easily into a "real" old album, or (with a change in image size) exhibitions by Egglestone, Paul Seawright or numerous other well known photographers.
No current web site was found for the artist, though there are a footballer and a cinema actress with that name. There is also a US commercial wedding and family photographer, who I am assuming is not Ms Taylor.
Taylor also appears in C&N p.67.
links - OCA
Sam Taylor-Johnson
Sam Taylor-Johnson
b: 1967 Croydon
Described in Wikipedia as,
an English filmmaker and photographer. Her directorial feature film debut came in 2009 with Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of the Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. She is one of a group of artists known as the Young British Artists …
Taylor-Johnson began exhibiting fine art photography in the early 1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor-Wood reprising the roles of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in a pastiche of the photo-portrait made—by photographer Annie Leibovitz—a few hours before Lennon was assassinated, in 1980.
In 1994, she exhibited a multi-screen video work titled Killing Time, in which four people mimed to an opera score. From that point multi-screen video works became the main focus of Taylor-Johnson's work. Beginning with the video works Travesty of a Mockery and Pent-Up in 1996. One of Taylor-Johnson's first United Kingdom solo shows was held at the Chisenhale Gallery, east London, in September–October 1996. Taylor-Johnson was nominated for the annual Turner Prize in 1998, but lost out to the painter Chris Ofili. She won the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale.
In 2000, Taylor-Johnson created a wraparound, photomural around scaffolding of the London department store Selfridges while it was being restored; the mural featured 21 cultural icons including Elton John, musician Alex James and actors Richard E. Grant and Ray Winstone. The poses of the figures referenced famous works of art from the past and recent movies.
In 2002, Taylor-Johnson was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to make a video portrait of David Beckham—whom she depicted sleeping. She is perhaps best known for her work entitled 'Crying Men' which features many of Hollywood's glitterati crying, including Robin Williams, Sean Penn, Laurence Fishburne and Paul Newman. In 2006, Taylor-Johnson had a survey exhibition at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom.
2014 saw a new photographic exhibition by Taylor-Johnson, of the private apartment of Mademoiselle Chanel at The Saatchi Gallery. Entitled ‘Second Floor’, the series of 34 photographs captured the private rooms of Coco Chanel at 31 Rue Cambon in Paris. Wikipedia
sources - Wikipedia [accessed 6 November 2018]
links - artist's web site
added 6Nov18
Edward Thompson
Edward Thompson
b: ?
Thompson was suggested as a photographer of interest (along with Viviane Moos) by my tutor in feedback on assignment 2, for which I photographed a church, St Stephen Walbrook.
Thompson describes himself on his website as,
a British documentary photographer, artist and lecturer. His photographic work has focused on various subjects over the years covering environmental issues, socio-political movements, subcultures and the consequences of war. edwardthompson.co.uk
Of particular interest in the context of my assignment is Thompson's photo-essay, Cowboy Church. Unlike my Assignment work, Thompson's essay concentrates on the congregation and their activities (both religious and rural) rather than the physical fabric of the church itself. The photographs are technically competent, although the cropping on some images might be questioned as it sometimes includes extraneous detail (e.g. 21.-Bible---Bulls-night on the web site) and at other times seems to exclude relevant detail (e.g. 08.-Sunday-Service--the-laying-on-hands on the web site). The strength of the concept and the subject, however, far outweigh the subjective aesthetic opinions of this writer.
Thompson founded and runs the occasional School of Punktum, intensive 48-hour training courses for committed photographers. Punctum is the second (and more profound) of Barthes' constituents of a photograph. Presumably, spelling in with a "k" is intended to add a frissonic edge to the notion.
The other photo-essays shown on Thompson's site include:
The Unseen: An Atlas of Infrared Plates,
striking counter-intuitively-coloured images of various subjects (many rural), using the last remaining rolls of Kodak Aerochrome, infra-red film.
Syrian Refugees in Lebanon,
poignant images of the inhabitants of a refugee camp, confirming Thompson's credentials as a socially aware and committed photographer.
Occupy London, covering the anti-capitalist occupation near St Paul's Cathedral in 2011.
sources - no wikipedia entry found
links - artist's web site
added 17Dec18
Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans
b: 1968 Remscheid, West Germany
a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium’s foundations.
Tillmans was the first photographer – and also the first non-British person – to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize. wikipedia
One of Peter Stepan's 50 Photographers You Should Know.
The 2000 Turner Prize was awarded for "work [engaging] with different aspects of contemporary culture, while challenging conventional aesthetics, taking photography in new directions in both his methods of working and in the presentation of his work" (Tate). I cannot say that I am a particular fan of his work and have nothing positive to say about what I have seen of it.
sources - Wikipedia, Stepan (2008)
links - artist's web site, Stepan (2008)
added - 23Dec18
Alys Tomlinson
Alys Tomlinson
b: Brighton
Tomlinson won the Sony World Photography prize in 2018 for her project Ex Voto, a study of pilgrimage which built on a previous project on Lourdes. She takes considered, detailed images (particularly portraits for Ex Voto) using a Sinar F1 5x4 with a Schneider 150mm lens. The study initially used colour, but she stated in an AmPhot interview (Mar 2019), "[o]nce I changed to black & white, it mirrored the purity and timelessness of the people and place, giving the images a mysterious quality". Of her choice of equipment she said, "I chose to shoot the project on large format as it really slows the whole process down, and allows for a much more considered approach".
sources -
links - artist's web site
added - 8Mar19
Arthur Tress
Logo v.2
b: 1940
As reported in the blog, I bought Theatre of the mind in order to track down a quote from A.D. Coleman who wrote the introduction. I didn't even know it was a photography book, I expected (being of a literal mind) essays concerning the theatre. And I had not heard of Arthur Tress, described in Wikipedia as, 'known for his staged surrealism'.
But what a revelation it is: Tress leaps into my 20-or-so top three photographers. As noted in the blog, this are, one kind of photography I would love to engage with but never will because I do not mix with strange people who want to be photographed doing bizarre things in unusual places'.
sources - Wikipedia
links - artist's web site
added - 21May20
Paul Trevor
Paul Trevor,
Liverpool Echo
b: 1947
The 27Oct18 of AmPhot includes an article on a Bristol exhibition of Trevor's work, In Your Face. Trevor was part of the politically-committed Exit Photography Group which produced the Down Wapping booklet in 1974, documenting the disappearing dock community. The Group, with some changes in personel, went on to explore areas of poverty and deprivation in Britain, notably in Glasgow (as a group), Liverpool (Trevor), Birmingham (Nicholas Battye), Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Belfast (these three by Chris Steele-Perkins).
Trevor was simultaneously working on images of people where he lived in Brick Lane and in the 1980s revived this project, this time concentrating on the financial districts of The City, nearby: a notable contrast of subjects.
The Bristol exhibition is the first of this project for 25 years.
links - artist's web site, Martin Parr Foundation, Liverpool Museums
Willard Van Dyke
Willard Van Dyke, 1983
b: 1906 / d: 1986
Van Dyke is described by Wikipedia as, "an American filmmaker, photographer, arts administrator, teacher, and former director of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art". It continues,
Van Dyke’s involvement with photography started when he was young. He recalled that "I had been playing around with a camera and developing my own pictures since I was 12 years of age." In 1928, he went to see a photographic exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, where he not only saw some Edward Weston’s work but met him. It was a life-changing experience.
In 1928, he apprenticed with Edward Weston and by 1932 co-founded Group f/64, with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Weston. The group’s approach emphasized both sharp and deep focus (sometimes called straight photography) in contrast with the painterly approach of many other photographers. Van Dyke soon abandoned still photography, saying in a 1982 documentary based on his life that he did not want to compete with his closest friend, Weston.
Van Dyke's photographs were marked by a tendency to address social issues, as in portraits of migrant workers, as well as purely formal subjects. This interest apparently led him to documentary films. "The effects of the Depression were very disturbing to me, and I felt anxious to promote change," he once said to an interviewer. "I was young and impatient, and felt that the documentary film would more effectively communicate issues to more people than would still photography." (New York Times) He also suggested that he abandoned photography because he did not want to compete with his closest friend, Weston. citation
sources Wikipedia
links
Maarten Vanvolsem
Maarten Vanvolsem
(from Twitter)
b: 1974 Brussels
Vanvolsem is introduced in Part 3 of the EyV course, Traces of Time, dealing with the shutter.
He develops slit-scan cameras which distort moving images. There is a good chapter on this technique in Experimental Photography (Exp) that explores the work of Tony Kemplen.
Vanvolsem's work is displayed at Kusseneers Gallery from which the following is taken,
Do images, built in time by the movement of the film, give us an image of time?
This photography is trying to open up the view on photographic images, who are way too often seen as a depiction of something in front of the camera, captured and frozen in a split second. However, all images are the result of a technology that is different of the human eye. This technology should therefore be taken into consideration whenever we look at a photographic image.
These images get their meaning in the continuous changes along the horizontal basic line, changes due to the moving film and camera. What we see is an evolving time, a camera-time, which is variable, which causes sharpness and blur, and that holds the centre of the image. The depicted is of minor importance to the subject, the dynamic time, shown in the picture. The camera-time is readable in the changes, on the one site in space (objects altering in position), on the other site of space (stretching, compressing, mirroring,…). The obvious deviation of these images compared to the ‘eye’s-view’ allow a new analysis of the photographic image. This analysis might have a lot in common with music. As in music the melody is defined by the changes from one note to the next, the flux is more important than the discrete notes. Similar the photographic image can be read as a dynamic melody. Kusseneers Gallery
links - Kusseneers gallery
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sources - Wikipedia
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