Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his “deadpan images of banal scenes and objects in the United States” and for his pioneering use of color in fine art photography. At age 14, he sold three photographs to the Museum of Modern Art, and at 24, he became the second living photographer to do a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this video, Shore talks a little about his work and shares some of his thoughts on photography.
Photographer Lori Nix spends weeks and months creating extremely detailed miniature scenes — called dioramas — and then photographs them using an old fashioned 8×10 large format camera. This video offers a look at what goes on behind-the-scenes at Nix’s Brooklyn studio, and how she goes about creating her unique images. You see some of her photos in this post we published a year ago featuring her photography.
Los Angeles-based photographer Dave Hill created this video showing all 11 photographs in his Adventure series deconstructed, giving us a glimpse of how they were put together. Hill lights and shoots different portions of his photographs separately, then combines them all into a single image using crazy Photoshop skills. Reminds me of Disney’s amazing multi-plane camera.
What just about every scene kid and hipster under the age of 25 calls themselves these days. Many own Canon Rebel xtis and rely heavily on cropping and Photoshop filters to give their otherwise mundane photos an “artsy” feel. It is also not uncommon to see them wielding Lomography cameras (usually a Holga, now that they’re sold at Urban Outfitters) on any given day. Typically, these “photographers” cite Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, or, in the case of those Vice Magazine devotees, Terry Richardson, Cobrasnake, or Richard Kern, as major influences, because they couldn’t name any other photographers to save their lives.
The typical subjects of their photographs include, but are not limited to: pidgeon-toed girls in Converse that have been drawn on with ballpoint pens and/or Sharpies, flowers/weeds growing out of cracks in sidewalks, juxtapositions of objects that typically don’t go together (in one such case, a Queen of Hearts playing card on a cracked sidewalk), a girl who looks like something out of an American Apparel ad smoking a cigarette, decaying buildings, and just about anything that looks “vintage” (ie, yellowing washing machines in a laundromat).
If you actually know what you’re doing enough to make money from photography, you’re just a poser.
The New York Times has a powerful piece about photographer Giles Duley. Duley was covering a patrol in Afghanistan back in February when he stepped on a bomb and lost an arm and both legs:
“I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I knew wasn’t a good sign,” he said. “I saw my left arm. It was just obviously shredded to pieces, and smoldering. I couldn’t feel my legs, so straightaway and from what I could see in the tree, I figured they were gone.”
[...] Rather than tally what was missing, Mr. Duley counted what remained.
“I thought, ‘Right hand? Eyes?’ ” — he realized that all of these were intact — “and I thought, ‘I can work.’ ”
And work is what he plans to continue doing. Duley expects to be self-dependent within the year and to continue working as a photographer — perhaps even in Afghanistan. You can help finance Duley’s recovery and return to photography through this website.
Here’s a short inspirational video featuring Canadian photographer Jeff Wall in which he talks about his method of allowing his eyes to do “photography” first before using his camera.
A great way to get inspired is to listen to other people who are serious about photography talk about their work and things they’ve learned. Here’s a short video in which photographer Daniel Milnor talks about capturing stories through film photography. After getting into the “fast lane” by switching to digital, Milnor hit a wall and rediscovered his passion for photography by going back to shooting film with Leica rangefinders.
Here’s a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer of the Boston Red Sox, talks about his experiences with shooting baseball. He offers some good tips that apply to other sports as well (e.g. try and anticipate).
Argentinian photographer Irina Werning’s “Back to the Future” series of photographs features people reenacting photographs of themselves taken decades ago, and has made Werning a well-known photographer after going viral on the Internet over the past year.
I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future. [#]
NPR created the behind-the-scenes video above in which Werning talks about her interesting project.
There’s a well known photography joke that goes, “If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event, which lens would you use?” While it’s certainly morbid and pretty absurd, there’s plenty of examples of photographers having a “shoot first” mentality in a time of crisis. The rally racing photographer seen in this video provides one such example.
