Cultural Event # 3

The last Cultural Event, was actually the first event I went to at DU our FSEM field trip to down town. This trip seems so long ago but it is still probably one of my favorites. It introduced me to the city of Denver, my new classmates as well as allowed us to delve more into photography and lighting and travel on the light rail for the first time. Being able to see Denver through a lens was so interesting, we went to the Union Station (somewhere I would probably never have found myself with out this trip), the next place we went to was a few back alley's Roddy, our teacher took us to, it was really fun to walk around behind the scenes of many shops and restaurants taking pictures and playing with the lighting. We ran into a few waiters/cooks who put on a show for us. Found the word "cruel" and was asked to pose under it by everyone, it was really fun being a model for everyone. I was able to get pictures from everyone, that I still love! We continued on towards the Denver Art Museum, we wound up spending to much time taking pictures and didn't wind up going but I enjoyed what we did more than any museum. We ate at Mad Greens, which was so delicious! On our way back we took a lot of playful pictures around the fountain downtown, all together I came out of that trip having around 50 pictures I loved and still are some of my favorite. I had a lot of fun on this trip and was definitely a very unforgettable time.

Cultural Event # 2

Due to the fact Cultural Events are rather subjective, I choose to do my next cultural event on a concert I went to. It may not be a cultural event of DU but it is very much a cultural event of Denver. The Concert was for the artist Trevor Hall. Trevor Hall is able to captivate even the most reluctant of audience members. The Ogden Theater was filled with adoring fans of all types, straight edged suit wearing men to couples with matching dreadlocks. The concert began and fans clamored to the stage. When Trevor hit the stage the place lit up and was jumping through till the end song. There wasn't one member in the audience not belting out his lyrics as he sang. The interaction between Trevor and his fans was phenomenal, he is so humble and really engaged everyone. The concert was one of the best things/events I've experienced at DU! The talent on the stage blew my mind and Trevor Hall's appreciation for his fans is clearly communicated when he jumped the top balcony of the Ogden Theater to surf the crowd! (into my friends hands) The drummer jammed with such passion. Every single person kept on jamming. The people that the Trevor Hall concert brings together is such a wide variety but as everyone starts singing and dancing unity is felt across the crowd and the energy created is out of this world. Keeping with his normal concert tradition, at the end left the whole audience in anticipation of an encore, which he of course obliged and appeared back on stage after a few minutes of ecstatic chanting. Still his concerts are some of my favorite things, seeing him preform in CO was such an amazing experience.

Cultural Event #1

For our FSEM our class took a trip to an Art Gallery located in the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery. We were given a private tour of the Art Gallery. The gallery was entitled, "Changing landscapes". It was a mixture between French and American landscapes. When first hearing about this it sounded like boring exhibit that I was not looking forward to. Once we walked in, the ambiance of the room changed my mind about how the following hour would go. Everything was nicely set up, and very visually please. The tour started and I will admit at first I was terribly bored with being there. Staring at pictures of trees and cows, was boring to me. I could not wait to get out of there, and be anywhere but there. But the curator went on explaining the pictures. Their importance to the people, the importance of documenting the changed landscape, the time period, the land itself that started off with being a rural country sides to being industrialized with trains. I'm glad I was able to go to this exhibit and without having been forced to go as a class I probably wouldn't have even known it existed. After we left, I felt I knew a lot more about the importance of landscapes, how detailed they actually are and their importance. 

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens

I found this film to be a first-rate, high-energy production that kept me on the edge of my chair the whole time. This film is a brief show into the world of Annie Leibovitz. It is an interesting glimpse into the life that Annie has lived and the career she has established. I believe Annie is the current greatest American photographer. And her style is absolutely inspiring to anyone who is even slightly intrigued by photography, she's truly inspirational.  Towards the beginning of the film we see into Annie's childhood, her family constantly moved but the one constant she had was photography she said that life is like looking through a lens, that the car window she looked through every time they moved. In fact resembled a lens to her which is where her love for photography began. I don't think there is any other work out there that can even compare to Annie's, it's so unique. She truly captures the essence of a person, you can look at her work and almost instantly pick it out as hers. Because of this people have fallen head over heels with her work. Every celebrity dying to have her photograph them. She can really capture something amazing and jaw dropping about each subject. She captures their character, their insecurities essentially their auras. She can understand her subjects unlike anyone before. Her photographs can bring such a sense of joy or sorrow by only a simple glimpse. She has definitely changed the playing field of photography and set such a huge bar for people to try and compete with. The movie was riveting and inspiring. Life Through a Lens does an excellent job of showing how this extraordinarily talented woman came to the forefront of modern photography.

Keith Carter Movie

This is a simple, well-made documentary on Keith Carter, it guides you through his working process, thoughts on art and life, as well as providing glimpses of his home, studio, darkroom, travels, family, etc. And if there is one word you could use to describe Carter's photography, it is human, sometimes revealing, oftentimes mysterious, but always tapped into and informed by the human experience. In this DVD, Keith Carter is expaining in detail about his views on photography, demonstrating how he works and also giving some personal hints to beginner and intermediate photographers. To me this movie made Keith Carter come across as a real person, a real artist. I will say however that compared to the other two videos we watched in class this was my least favorite movie. It was a lot less personal, only giving us a glimpse into who he was. While the other two showed the artists' vulnerable sides. It exposed weakness which made you feel a lot closer to the photographers  and you were able to really relate to them. Although the scene talking about his mother was very touching. For me it was hard to stay engaged and interested in the video. As far as a documentary goes however it was a great film. Altogether it was a well put together DVD that I did enjoy watching.

Sally Mann, What Remains

Sally later on in her life took many pictures of her immediate family with 8x10 film. This caused a lot of controversy among viewers. The images of her children mimic and act out social and familial roles in their Virginia home. The children try an convey both primal and playful aspects of human behavior. She called this series, "Immediate Family." :When her kids got older she shifted her focus away from her children and focused a lot on landscape she did this with a damaged lens. That requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process. Sally won many awards in her life and most of her work currently resides in many museums.

What Remains is a subjective, intimate look at the life and career of American photographer Sally Mann. It is one of the most exquisitely intimate portraits not only of an artist's process, but also of a marriage and a life, to appear on television in recent memory. What Remains feels deeply personal. Mann shares her hopes and fears. The film captures Mann's self-doubts, After watching this all I could think was, "Oh my goodness what spectacular woman Sally Mann is." She's very intelligent and immensely talented. I was first introduced to her work when I saw the series she did of her children. It was amazing. The documentary chronicles her time creating her "Death Series," which was also very thought-provoking. And her views toward death are surprisingly refreshing as well. Plus, where and how she lives resonates so much with me. She's an inspiration indeed.  The director Cantor does an excellent job of letting us get to know Mann through her life and work, and she is such an interesting person! I had never heard of or seen her work before and it's truly beautiful and haunting. “What Remains" is an interesting study on artistic purpose as well as life and death captured on film.  Sally Mann's work really captures my attention and watching this film has definitely made me a fan.

On Photography

Susan Sontag's essay On Photography starts by diving into seeing photography as a direct correlation to Plato's cave. Plato was a famous Greek philosopher who has had a great influence on Western thought and civilization. Plato's cave, is one of his thought-provoking arguments, in which he encourages us to think intelligently for ourselves. The story is about these prisoners trapped in a dark cave, one day one of the prisoners escapes the cave and explore the world. He returns to the other prisoners in the cave to tell them all about the world he's seen, a world unimaginable. The prisoners refuse to believe a world he says is the truth because to them all their reality has been is the darkness inside the cave, because they've known nothing but darkness. From this mass media has used photographs to manipulate the world we see around us. Yes, the argument is there that it can help expand what we see in our world. But it limits what we see as well. It shows the viewer what the photographer wants them to see as a reality.  We accept photographs as facts, when in fact 90% of photographs in today's world are posed/staged. To show what is wanted to be shown not the honest truth. However we are able to see more of the world, we no longer are confined to our small sheltered world. We can see the Great Pyramid's, we can travel to Africa, dive hundreds of feet underwater. We can see anything. Photography has opened up the world to everyone.   Sontag delves into how photographs are smaller duplication's of reality. But as she inserted the metaphor of Plato's caves I believe that is not exactly what she believes photographs to be. Photograph's show "a" reality but not the reality, the shadows in the cave to the prisoners were just as real as the world was to the man that escaped into. Each reality is different. I believe photographs help us get one step closer to understanding the reality of others but there main point she gets a across to us is: There is no one true reality. 

Photography has expanded our view of the world around us, it's opened up so many portals. But photography has also shrunken our world, it's made our world more accessible, it's made the world become closer.  It's a way to show things when words are not enough, it's about seeing events and things through another person's eyes, another reality. It's the closest way to see out of the eyes of another. It's a way to show other what I myself see through a lens.

Sally Mann (May 1, 1951- Now )

Sally later on in her life took many pictures of her immediate family with 8x10 film. This caused a lot of controversy among viewers. The images of her children mimic and act out social and familial roles in their Virginia home. The children try an convey both primal and playful aspects of human behavior. She called this series, "Immediate Family." :When her kids got older she shifted her focus away from her children and focused a lot on landscape she did this with a damaged lens. That requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process. Sally won many awards in her life and most of her work currently resides in many museums.

Gregory Crewdson (1962- Present)

Crewdson is an American Photographer who most known for his elaborately staged, surreal scenes of American homes and neighborhoods. As a teenager he was park of a rock group. "Let Me Take Your Photo" was their hit song that revealed his future career.  The song was used to promote digital cameras.  His photographs usually are of small town America's but very dramatic and cinematic. Many times his pictures are considered disturbing. He started another genre of surreal photography.

Nancy "Nan" Goldin 1953- now

Golden is known best for taking intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. She started a new era of photography really never done before. She moved to NY where she began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene She was most known for her work in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Which depicted drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. She was criticized by glorifying drugs in the American culture.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman was born in New York, she is considered a film director and a great American photographer. She is most well known for her self-portraits.She enrolled herself in many art classes (actually flunking out of a photography class due to the lack of her technical knowledge. She was inspired later on by a professor who told her, "just take pictures". She was majoring in painting at the time then after she began taking lots of pictures, loved the instantaneousness of photography and switched. She is known for typically photographing herself in a range of costumes and scenes. She really broadened the role of woman in photography.

Francesca Woodman 1958 – 1981

Francesca Woodman’s performance work is documented by a series of intense photographs, for the most part in black & white. She grew up in an old countryside farm house in Italy for most of her childhood which influenced a lot of her art work. Even as a young artist she came up with concepts for her work where her body becomes almost transparent and blended in with different types of material, as if wanting to try to be beneath the surface of the walls. She created such an odd and artistic new approach to photography that really had not been seen yet.

Robert Adams February 7–May 28, 2006

Robert Adams has photographed the landscape of the American West, focusing on California, Oregon, and his home state of Colorado for more than 40 years. He was inspiried by the beauty of the landscape, and also his concerns about it's exploitation destruction for residential and commercial development.
 He recorded two kinds of landscapes, one damaged by people and the natural untouched landscape. Later around the 1970s his work, was published under the title The New West. He also later did a lot of work with portraits, but he is most known for his landscapes.

Diane Arbus 1923- 1971

Diane Arbus was one of the most distinctive photographers in the twentieth century, known for her eerie portraits and offbeat subjects. She first started at a young age with drawings and paintings. Later after marrying Allan Arbus, she learned the technique behind photography. Diane Arbus started out in advertising and fashion photography, appearing in magazines like Vogue. She began to began taking photographs of people she found while walking around around New York City. She was known for going to great lengths to get the shots she wanted. She committed suicide in her New York apartment on July 26, 1971. All of her work is still huge interest, and her life was part of the basis of the 2006 film called Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus.

Robert Frank (1924- 19??)

Robert Frank is a Swiss photographer and filmmaker. He originally did a lot of fashion photography He then abandoned fashion photography about 1948 and went to the United States and then to Peru to explore the expressive possibilities of the 35-mm camera. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1947 and pursued photography. He is best known for his photography collection The Americans which is most noted for ironic renderings of American life. It was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American society.

Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908 – 2004

Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was  a master of candid photography and 35 mm format. He helped develop the "street photography" or "real life reportage" style that has influenced generations of photographers who followed. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with “the decisive moment”-the title of his first major book. After WWII he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, enabling him and many other photographers to work with magazines like Life.

Robert Capa (1913-1954)

Capa was a Hungarian combat photographer nd photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, WWII across Europe, and he documented the course of World War II in London, N. Africa, Italy and Battle of Normondy and the liberation of Paris. He was known for being up close and personal with his photographs and in that way was rather careless his photographs as a war photographer had made him a legend in modern photography, but came to an abrupt end when he stepped on a land mine on an obscure battlefield in Indochina. Capa co-founded Magnum Photos with, among others, the French photographer Henri Bresson. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)

Lange is most noted for documented the change on the homefront, especially among ethnic groups and workers uprooted by the war. Especially after Pearl Harbor came about and Japanese internment camps began growing Lange was hired to photograph the camps. Lange's earlier work documenting displaced farm families and migrant workers during the Great Depression did not prepare her for the disturbing racial and civil rights issues raised by the Japanese internment. Lange created images that frequently juxtapose signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration. Most of these photographs were censored by the federal government

Margaret Bourke-White

White became interested in photography while studying at Cornell University. After studying photography under Clarence White at Columbia University she opened a studio in Cleveland where she specialized in architectural photography.  Deeply influence by the impact of the Depression, she became increasingly interested in politics. In 1936 Bourke-White joined Life Magazine and her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on its first front-cover. 
During the Second World War Bourke-White served as a war correspondent, working for both Life Magazine and the U.S. Air Force. Bourke-White also covered the Korean War where she took what she considered was her best ever photograph. This was of a meeting between a returning soldier and his mother, who thought he had been killed several months earlier. She spent eight years writing her autobiography, Portrait of Myself (1963)

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946)

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stieglitz left for schooling and returned  trying to prove photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. Joining many photography clubs.  Over his fifty-year career he spent most of it in making photography an accepted art form. He influenced generations of photographers, painters, and sculptors both directly and indirectly. In 1905, with Edward Steichen, he founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which later became known as 291 . He increased photography's status to the level of painting and sculpture through many pioneering exhibitions that he organized. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz is known for New York art galleries that he ran

George Eastman 1854-932

 American inventor and philanthropist, establishing the Eastman School of Music in Rodchester and was an entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company he played a leading role in transforming photography from an expensive hobby of a few devotees into a relatively inexpensive and immensely popular pastime.  In 1884 Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable; four years later he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film.  The Eastman Kodak Company was one of the first firms to mass-produce standardized photography equipment and roll film. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film.

Richard Leach Maddox 1816 -11, 1902)

In the 1870s many attempts were made to find a dry substitute for wet collodion.  In 1871 Richard Leach Maddox, an English physician, who was very into photomicrography - photographing minute organisms under the microscope, suggested putting silver bromide in a gelatin emulsion, an idea that led to the introduction of factory-produced dry plates coated with gelatin containing silver salts. marking the beginning of the modern era of photography.

Lewis Wickes Hine 1874-1940.

Studied sociology then was hired New York at a Ethical Culture School. He purchased his first camera in 1903, employed his photographs in his teaching and established what became known as documentary photography. 
Hine also used his camera to capture the poverty he witnessed in New York. n 1908 Hine published Charities and the Commons, a collection of photographs of tenements and sweatshops. Hine hoped he could use these photographs to help bring about social reform. Hine was a strong advocate against child labor and strongly fought against it. And was sucessful in his campaign against it. Sadly and slightly ironically Lewis Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November, 1940.

Jacob Riis 1849 – 1914

Riis worked as a carpenter in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States in 1870. When living here he lived in poverty. In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder. Over the next twenty-five years Riis wrote and lectured on the problems of the poor. Riis also wrote over a dozen books including and took pictures truly capturing the slums and the life of the people in poverty

Timothy H. O'Sullivan 1840-1882

Timothy H. O'Sullivan began his photography career as an apprentice to Mathew Brady, when the Civil war broke out however he left to work on his own. In 1862 or 1863, he joined the studio of Alexander Gardner and became a photographer helping to create "Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War". O'Sullivan's experience photographing in the field earned him a position as a photographer for the first governmental survey of the American West.  in 1874 and made prints for the Army Corps of Engineers. Soon after being made chief photographer for the United States Treasury in 1880 he passed away.

Alexander Gardner 1821- 1882

An American photographer, first starting off as a  young reporter and newspaper editor in Glasgow, Scotland. Gardner dreamed of a living in a rustic american wilderness. He selected a place in Iowa to live, and even sent family and friends to live there, however Gardner never joined them. Instead, when he disembarked in New York he remained. Where he became Matthew Brady's assistant for seven years. Then the Civil War broke out.  In 1866 he published Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, the first published collection of Civil War photographs. He worked with Tim O'Sullivan and 11 other photographers.  It was a complete commercial failure. After the war he finally traveled West to his promised land, taking photographs along the way.

Nadar 1820-1910

Originally known as Gaspard Félix Tournachon. Nadar, derived from youthful slang, but became his professional signature and the name by which he is best known today. Nadar first started as a freelance writer, which actually made him famous first as a writer than he was as a photographer. He worked as a cartoonist as well making his photography unique. He focused on characteristics of a subject and realized each person had a single distinct facet, he was prone to capturing the personality of his photographic subjects. He focused on the psychological elements of photography, aiming to reveal the moral personalities of his sitters rather than make attractive portraits. He took many pictures mainly of friends and acquaintances, but he branched out. His curiosity led him beyond the studio into such uncharted locales as the catacombs, which he was one of the first persons to photograph using artificial light.

Julia Margaret Cameron 1864–1875

Julia Cameron, the first famous woman photographer. She began he career as a photographer at a late age of 48 after receiving a camera as a gift. Julia made everyone model for her whether they were friends, family, servants or residents of her hometown Freshwater. She had connections through her husband and was able to move up into some of the highest circles of society in England and take their portraits. And overtime became well known for her celebrity photographs. Most of her photography was not appreciated at the time and went away from the norm of portraits but she did many close ups and tried to capture the essence of the models which helped inspire more modern photographers.

Francis Firth 1822-1898

An English man who came from a Quaker family. Firth is most notable for his photographic concentration in the Middle East as well as creating the biggest photography firm.  In 1843 he suffered a nervous breakdown but after a few years of travel he began to become more stable and made himself a very successful businessman. Firth help founded the Liverpool Photographic Society in 1853. Firth is most notable for his traveling and exotic (mainly architectural) photography. 

Roger Fenton

Fenton is most recognized for being the first photographer to go out and get extensive photographic documents of war. (More specifically the "Crimson War"). Fenton became the official photographer and with his assistant set up their darkroom in a wagon. They used Acher's wet-collodion photographic process and took around 360 pictures of the war. The pictues were not really about emotions of agony of the war but more of the simple more factual things of war. When returning back home to England his photographs were displayed in both England and France. He finally retired from photography and went into practicing law.

Frederick Scott Archer 1813-1857

Frederick Archer is most well known for his single achievement that made photography available for the general public. This achievement is called the "Wet Plate Collodion Process" published in The Chemist in 1848. In publishing this article he knowingly didn't patent it and gave this discovery as a gift the the rest of the world. Archer later became a sculptor using photography as a very useful way t capture the images of subjects. Sadly because he did not patent his process he made very little money off of it and died impoverished.

Hill and Adamson

Hill was originally a landscape painter and had made a name for himself at the age of 19. He helped found the "Royal Scottish Academy" and helped run it for 40 years. Hill decided he wanted to do portraits and asked for the help of Adamson, who at this time was a chemist. Adamson had been experimenting calotype photographic process. Because of Hill's status, they made portraits of some of the most prominent delegates who, other prominent Scots watched and wished to have their portraits made. Hill and Adamson preferred the Calotype because a) it was less expensive. b.) it got rid of extreme detail so they could control lighting better c.) gestures and expressions could be the focus and d.) overall they were able to emphasize the models's personality rather than the technicalness found in Daguerretype photography. Hill after Adsamson died at a young age. Went back to painting and abandoned photography temporarily.

Henry Fox Talbot

Henry Talbot was a chemist, linguist, archaeologist and considered another pioneer photographer. Henry had taken Daguerre's process and had created a better version of it in 1840 called it the calotype. Unlike Daguerre's processes Henry's processes used "paper negatives". Where were essentially contact prints on paper that was highly light-sensitive that multiple prints could be made. If he had made his announcement he instead of Louis Daguerre would probably have been known as the founder of photography. In 1841 Talbot patented the process and lost many friends because he refused to share his knowledge of the process. He also created the first book with photographic illustrations.

Louis Daguerre 1787-1851

Louis was a initially a French inventor who was a scene painter for the opera and in 1822 opened an exhibit of viewings that he created that were affected by changes in lighting. In 1826 Nicephore found out all about what Daguerre was doing and in 1829 signed a partnership with Louis. Sadly it was a very short one, due to Nicephore's death in 1833. After Nicephore's death however Louis continued experimenting. And 1835, an accident happened a very important accident as some of the most famous inventions happen. Louis discovered that by exposing an iodized silver plate (which he had placed in his chemical cupboard) that a image had developed on the plate. The description of this process was announced at the Academy of Sciences.

Nicephore (Josheph) Niepce 1833-1765

Nicephore came from a wealthy family (his father being a lawyer), so durning the French revolution him an his whole family fled. He is most famous for the world's first "photograph" that was produced in 1825. Nicephore was a pioneer in the field of photography creating photographic etchings in the 17th century, such as a man with a horse and a woman spinning a wheel. Nicephore was around when the camera obscura was out but he had a very uneasy hand and couldn't race the images from the obscura. By this frustration it attempted to create an image permanently, experimenting with lithography.