BA Phot

V&A

October 2018 Page 3

Back - Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 4


Masao Yamamoto

b: 1957 Gamagori City, Japan
From wikipedia,

He began his art studies as a painter, studying oil painting under Goro Saito in his native city. He presently uses photography to capture images evoking memories. He blurs the border between painting and photography, by experimenting with printing surfaces. He dyes, tones (with tea), paints on, and tears his photographs. His subjects include still-lives, nudes, and landscapes. He also makes installation art with his small photographs to show how each print is part of a larger reality. wikipedia
Yamamoto Yamamoto Yamamoto
Figs. n
© Masao Yamamoto

Link - artist's web site, wikipedia


Dieter Meier

b: 1945 Zürich
This is another favourite. I used to do this decades ago: I was always fascinated by the way people arrange themselves on benches when there are just a few more people than benches. I photographed them surreptitiously when waiting for trains while commuting between Newport, Cardiff and Bristol. That would have been in the mid-1970s, but the negatives are long gone. There is a similar study to be done on how men arrange themselves at urinals when there aren't enough to space everyone two apart: that is, of course, much trickier to photograph and I have never tried it.

Meier's approach was different: to take a quick succession of photographs and depict the gradual realisation by the subjects that they are being photographed. It's all in the title,

29 pictures within 5 minutes, London, 14-October-1970, 17:00-17:05, in front of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Wikipedia describes an interesting life,

As a conceptual artist, he has been keeping himself busy with many art exhibitions. He began his career as a performance artist in the late 1960s . In 1972 as part of Documenta 5, Meier installed a commemorative plaque at the railway station in Kassel (Germany) which read: "On 23 March 1994, from 3 to 4 pm, Dieter Meier will stand on this plaque". He honored the promise 22 years later.
In the late 1970s Meier, already a millionaire industrialist and gambler, was brought in when the two founders of the Swiss electronic band Yello realised that they required a singer. The band was originally formed by Boris Blank (keyboards, sampling, percussion, backing vocals) and Carlos Perón (tapes) in the late 1970s. Perón left the band in 1983 to pursue a solo career, ultimately leaving Blank and Meier to record their most well known and commercially successful single "Oh Yeah" in which Meier provided almost all vocals, backing vocals and lyrics. "Oh Yeah" went on to feature in numerous films and television episodes in the following decades including Ferris Bueller's Day Off, director Jonathan Demme's Something Wild with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith, and the episode of South Park "Hell on Earth 2006".
Meier directed numerous films and videos, including German music group Alphaville's "Big in Japan" video. Along with Talking Heads vocalist David Byrne, Meier was a guest artist on the X-Press 2 album Muzikizum. He also performed lead vocals on the single "I Want You Back".
In the 1990s music took a backseat as Meier continued his performance art, designed silk scarves and was involved with ReWATCH, a company that recycles cans into watches. However, two more Yello albums did surface. In the late nineties, he bought 2200 hectares of land in Argentina, a four-hour drive away from Buenos Aires. The ranch is named "Ojo de Agua". His restaurant and store in Zurich has the same name from which he sells wine, meat, corn and soy products.
In 1989 Meier played a demimonde businessman in the Swiss drama-comedy Leo Sonnyboy by Rolf Lyssy, and in 1992 he had a part in the Daniel Schmid comedy, Hors Saison. In 2006 he acted in the bit part of 'Gamsie' in National Lampoon's Pledge This! In 2013, he played a furrier in the film Finsterworld.
Meier also serves on the board of Euphonix, a company that produces technology used in recording studios. wikipedia
Meier Meier Meier
See above for the title
© Dieter Meier

This gets an honourable mention in the Great Titles Awards.


Josef Sudek

b: 1896 Kolín, Bohemia / d: 1978 Prague
From Wikipedia,

a Czech photographer, best known for his photographs of Prague.
Sudek was originally a bookbinder. During the First World War he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army in 1915 and served on the Italian Front until he was wounded in the right arm in 1916 which led to the limb being amputated at the shoulder. After the war he studied photography for two years in Prague under Jaromir Funke. His army disability pension gave him leeway to make art, and he worked during the 1920s in the romantic Pictorialist style. Always pushing at the boundaries, a local camera club expelled him for arguing about the need to move forwards from 'painterly' photography. Sudek then founded the progressive Czech Photographic Society in 1924. Despite only having one arm, he used large, bulky cameras with the aid of assistants.
Sudek's photography is sometimes said to be modernist. But this is only true of a couple of years in the 1930s, during which he undertook commercial photography and thus worked "in the style of the times". Primarily, his personal photography is neo-romantic.
His early work included many series of light falling in the interior of St. Vitus Cathedral. During and after World War II Sudek created haunting night-scapes and panoramas of Prague, photographed the wooded landscape of Bohemia, and the window-glass that led to his garden (the famous The Window of My Atelier series). He went on to photograph the crowded interior of his studio (the Labyrinths series).
He first showed his work in “Five Photographers” at the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska/Lincoln in 1968. Then he showed at the George Eastman House in 1974 and he published 16 books during his life.
Known as the "Poet of Prague", Sudek never married, and was a shy, retiring person. He never appeared at his exhibit openings and few people appear in his photographs. Despite the privations of the war and Communism, he kept a renowned record collection of classical music.
In recent years, his work has frequently been reproduced in books, making his work some of the most readily accessible to those interested in twentieth-century Czech photography. Wikipedia
Sudek Sudek
Simple Still Life, Egg, 1950
© the estate of Josef Sudek

Link - Wikipedia, Creative Camera article


Edward Weston

b: 1886 Illinois / d: 1958 California
Wikipedia,

He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…" and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lives, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography"because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.
In 1947 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images. Wikipedia
Weston Weston
Valentine to Charis, 1935
© the estate of Edward Weston

Link - this site, Wikipedia


Otto Steinert

b: 1915 Saarbrücken, Germany / d: 1978 Essen
Wikipedia,

Steinert was a medical doctor by profession and was self-taught in photography. After World War II, he initially worked for the State School for Art and Craft (Staatliche Schule für Kunst und Handwerk, today HTW) in Saarbrücken.
He was the founder of the Fotoform photography group.
From 1959, he taught at the Folkwang Hochschule design school in Essen, where he later died.
His archive is part of the photographic collection of the Museum Folkwang, Essen. citation
Otto Steinert Otto Steinert
Luminogram, 1952
© the estate of Otto Steinert

Link - this site, Wikipedia


Aaron Siskind

b: 1903 New York / d: 1991 Providence, Rhode Island
Wikipedia,

He is considered to be closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement.
Siskind was a grade school English teacher in the New York Public School System for 25 years, and began photography when he received a camera as a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. Early in his career Siskind was a member of the New York Photo League, where he produced several significant socially conscious series of images in the 1930s, among them "Harlem Document".
Siskind's work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image which stands independent of the original subject. For some his work has been described as crossing the line between photography and painting, his photographs are works unique to the art form of photography. Wikipedia
Aaron Siskind Aaron Siskind
Martha's Vineyard 24, 1953
© the estate of Aaron Siskind

Link - Wikipedia

Page created 30-Oct-2018 | Page updated 09-Nov-2019