Artist Statement: Holga

This is the only color film I have done in this class. I really the special characters that holga camera brought to my photos: high contrast and vignetting. I also enjoyed my experiments of double exposure, even most of them are extremely overexposed, which led to very bright films with less visible subjects. My favorite one is the road scene with a stop sign. I like the contrast between blue sky and red sign and it received a right amount of lights. If I practice more and be more familiar with the holga camera, I will get more expected results since I will be.

Three Culture events

First Event

The solo performance I attended is a voice class for voice major students at University of Denver. Professor picked several students to perform individually each class. After each performance, professor pointed a student to make some comments. I thought all performances in the class were very professional and well prepared. However, students’ comments made me realize that even voice major students, who probably studied for years, still have spaces to improve.

First comment was that the performer needs more airflow that would help her voice to project better. The second song was “Maybe this time” performed by a female student. She got suggestions that because of the theme of the song, she need more body movements, which bring audiences into a feeling of musical/theater atmospheres. I think it’s a very good suggestion since people are naturally attracted to moving subject. Matched body languages with song would definitely add some points to the performance. The third performance was a very sad song singed by a male student. Even he singed very well, he was suggested to remain in the sad emotion while he was waiting to sing next part. Otherwise, his audiences will loss their focus as well.

 The next performance, a song written by Schubert, also had issues on focus. However, this time the person who lost focus during the performance was singer himself. So other classmate suggested that he need to find a focal point and force himself do not wonder about his audiences. The practical ways to keep focus are staying at present, making an eye focal point, and imaging a wall in the front.The fifth performer got a good consistency of focus, but she retreated herself too much while introducing the piece so that her audiences would feel the distance. The sixth performer had beautiful voice but he protected himself too much while performing, so his classmate suggested he to think that he is bigger than his standing and be more confident. 

 Next singer performed “Not a day goes by”, which was a great performance, other student suggested that in order to move her performance into next level, just like the first singer she need to improve her airflow volume and project her voice better. The following performer has been complimented as “one of the favorite” by her classmate. Because she chose to sing a piece in foreign language, her classmate pointed several pronunciations that need to be polished.
 The last performance was the most interesting one because of the theme and body languages. Even it was in Spanish, every audience who watched singer’s movement could understand it is a song about a drunken woman. Audiences never stopped laughing because of her spontaneous body languages. I think she is a good example for the second performer who needs to add more movements. Overall, I learned a lot from professional performance and professional critics.


Second Event
On Thursday,Xu Beihong's daughter came to DU to give a brief lecture about his father. The lecture talks about Xu Beihong's life and his art works.

He was primarily known for his Chinese ink paintings of horses and birds. Later, he studied in Europe, he created his own painting style by combining Chinese style and Europe style.So he was regarded as one of the first to create monumental oil paintings with epic Chinese themes - a show of his high proficiency in an essential Western art technique.

His daughter showed us 10 of his art works, which includes ink brush paintings, oil paintings, drawings and calligraphy. His paintings show historical events in China. I love his horse painting.


Third Event
As a whole, the BLINK! exhibition at Denver Art Museum had a very powerful impact on me. I have never before been exposed to art that involved that much moving image, lighting or audio aspects. Not only is it incredible to me how quickly technology has been growing, but it is even more fascinating how artists are quickly adjusting to the technology and applying it to new forms of art.

 I enjoyed the large variety that this exhibition offered. There was art that focused on political issues, humor, narrative, music, and other subjects. It was very wide-ranging because I felt all sorts of emotions from one piece to the next. The diversity of the mediums was also enjoyable. Whether it was video projections, television screens, or light bulbs, they were all new forms of art that I have never before seen. Each of the pieces worked with their space in their own, unique ways as well.

 Most pieces were at eye level, but some were positioned on the floor, others were higher up on the walls, and a couple were on the ceiling! All of the pieces required different forms of audience involvement as well. Some were blatantly interactive, some you could sit down compared to others where you had to stand, some required you to walk up very close to the piece, some required headphones, and others required its own isolated room. This was probably my favorite aspect of this exhibition because it was very different from what I am used to at museums.

Final part of history of photography

Robert Frank

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and manipulating photographs.

Robert Frank and his wife, June Leaf (right), at the opening of the Pingyao International Photography Festival, in Pingyao, China. Photograph by Edward Keating.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (March 14, 1923 – July 26, 1971) was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of "deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal.” A friend said that Arbus said that she was "afraid... that she would be known simply as 'the photographer of freaks'"; however, that phrase has been used repeatedly to describe her.In 1972, a year after she committed suicide, Arbus became the first American photographer to have photographs displayed at the Venice Biennale.Millions of people viewed traveling exhibitions of her work in 1972–1979. In 2003–2006, Arbus and her work were the subjects of another major traveling exhibition, Diane Arbus Revelations. In 2006, the motion picture Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus, presented a fictional version of her life story.

Photograph of Diane Arbus by Allan Arbus

Robert Adams

Robert Adams is an American photographer who has focused on the changing landscape of the American West. Between 1968 and 1971, Adams photographed the new suburban developments that were being built along the Colorado Front Range. The pictures were influential in their portrayal of the American West as a place of homogenized experience as well as in their contradiction between the beauty of the landscape and human presence. In 1973 and 1974, Adams created a comprehensive document that dispelled romantic notions of the American West. Prairie is an early publication by Adams that included pictures that were the in an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1978 and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1979. Between 1999 and 2003, Adams embarked on a series of photographs centering on the deforestation of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The subtext for the series was the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which led to the opening of the West for commercial interests. Summer Nights, Walking is a revised edition of Adams's early book "Summer Nights" . For about five years, beginning in 1974, Adams embarked on an experiment: he made a series of photographs at night—the opposite of the high-altitude daylight used in most of his previous photographs.

Robert Adams, On Signal Hill, Overlooking Long Beach, 1983, gelatin-silver print, 9 x 11 inches

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman (April 3, 1958 - January 19, 1981) was an American photographer best known for her black and white pictures featuring herself and female models. Many of her photographs show young nude women, blurred by camera movement and long exposure times, merging with their surroundings, or with their faces obscured. Her work continues to be the subject of much attention, years after she committed suicide at the age of 22. Public opinion has generally been favorable towards Woodman's work. At the 1998 exhibition in Paris, many people had "strong reactions" to her "interesting" photographs.A number of people have found Woodman's individual photos (for example "Self-portrait at 13") or her photography in general inspirational.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman (born January 19, 1954) is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in Europe and Metro Pictures gallery in New York. Through a number of different series of works, Sherman has sought to raise challenging and important questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and the nature of the creation of art.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Mann is perhaps best knownfor Immediate Family, her third collection, published in 1992. The NY Times said, “Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world.” The book consists of 65 black-and-white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10. Many of the pictures were taken at the family's remote summer cabin along the river, where the children played and swam in the nude. Many explore typical childhood themes (skinny dipping, reading the funnies, dressing up, vamping, napping, playing board games) but others touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death. The controversy on its release was intense, including accusations of child pornography (both in America and abroad) and of contrived fiction with constructed tableaux.

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (born September 26, 1962) is an American photographer who is best known for elaborately staged scenes of American homes and neighborhoods. Gregory Crewdson's photographs usually take place in small town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. The photographs are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lighted. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus.

Untitled photo from Gregory Crewdson's series Beneath the Roses (2003-2005)

Nan Goldin

Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years.In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror" and "All By Myself."

Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, NYC, 1991, 30 x 40 inches

Artist Statement - Self Portrait

I picked three picture that contain my figure. Two of them were my reflections from mirrors shoot by myself. Another one was shoot by someone else, who received my request. I think self-portrait is a very interesting topic. We rarely see ourself (appearance/movement) because most times we were watching others. We learned from others behaviors/ judges and shaped to please them. In the end, we forgot who we really are. Self-portraits force one to study one's own personas both physically and emotionally. It is an exploration to see behind the mirror and try to search into the soul.

History of Photography Project - Part 5

Dorothea Lange

Lange's 1936, Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson

Dorothea born as second generation of German immigrants on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was educated in photography in New York. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employmentwith the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Margaret Bourke White

An iconic photograph Margaret Bourke-White took of Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1946

White was an American photographer and documentary photographer.She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of SovietIndustry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover. She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after she developed her first symptoms. Her photographs are in the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the collection of the Library of Congress.

Henri Cartier Bresson

GREECE. Cyclades. Island of Siphnos. 1961.

He was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" or "real life reportage" style that has influenced generations of photographers who followed. Cartier-Bresson achieved international recognition for his coverage of Gandhi's funeral in India in 1948 and the last stage of the Chinese Civil War. He covered the last six months of the Kuomintang administration and the first six months of the Maoist People's Republic. He also photographed the last surviving Imperial eunuchs in Beijing, as the city was falling to the communists. From China, he went on to Dutch East Indies, where he documented the gaining of independence from the Dutch.

Robert Capa

WWII

Robert was a Hungarian combat photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris. His action photographs, such as those taken during the 1944 Normandy invasion, portray the violence of war with unique impact. In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos with, among others, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.

history of Photography Project - Part 4

Felix Nadar

Nadar was a French writer, caricaturist, and photographer who is remembered primarily for his photographic portraits, which are considered to be among the best done in the 19th century. he sold caricatures to humor magazines, then opened a photographic portrait studio. His portraits were a hit, and he began to innovate, building a giant hot air balloon to take the world's first aerial photograph. He also shot the Paris sewer system under electric light, and experimented with serial photography.


Alexander Gardner

Gardner was a photographer of the American Civil War and of the American West during the latter part of the 19th century.Gardner probably moved to the United States in 1856. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, Gardner assisted Brady in his effort to make a complete photographic record of the conflict. His photographs President Lincoln on the Battlefield of Antietam (1862) and Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg(1863) and his portraits of Abraham Lincoln are among the best-known photographs of the war period. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, a two-volume collection of 100 original prints, was published in 1866.


Timothy O'sullivan

O'Sullivan came to landscape photography after four years of experience photographing behind the lines and on the battlefields of the Civil War. A former assistant in Mathew Brady's New York studio, in 1861 he had joined the group known as "Brady's Photographic Corps," working with Alexander Gardner. Because Brady refused to credit the work of individual photographers, Gardner, taking O'Sullivan along, established his own Washington firm to publish war views. War images taken by O'Sullivan are wide-ranging in subject and direct in their message, including among them the weariness of 'inaction and continual waiting, and the horror of fields of the dead.


Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1870. After years of extreme poverty and hardship he finally found employment as a police reporter for the New York Tribune in 1877. In the 1880s his work gravitated towards reform and he worked with other New York reformers then crusading for better living conditions for the thousands of immigrants flocking to New York in search of new opportunities. His most popular work, How The Other Half Lives, became a pivotal work that precipitated much needed reforms and made him famous.Jacob Riis's photography, taken up to help him document the plight of the poor, made him an important figure in the history of documentary photography.

Artist Statement: Time

What is time? Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects. The objects of my films have different durations. The mountains were formed millions years ago and its changes are invisible in hundreds years. The trees germinated a few decades ago and they grow in hundreds years if environment is stable. The human beings rarely live longer than a hundred years and they are changing significantly each year. However, human's memory could last generations by generations in different forms, such as an oil portrait, a diary, or a photograph. If we take a look of our films after ten years, the mountains and trees will probably still stand in the same places with similar shapes. But ten years  will give a great influence on every people we shot, they might be married or divorced, successful or desperate, rich or poor, alive or dead.... time will tell....