Robert Mapplethorpe

1975

This image has stuck with me as a cornerstone of portrait photography since I saw it in Roland Barthes' Camera Obscura years ago. I find myself referencing this image in my own work, most times unintentionally at first.

The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation lists it as a self portrait, although I specifically remember it being called a "portrait of a young man" elsewhere. This makes me wonder, was Mapplethorpe also interested in the way that a camera can obscure identity?

Cai Guo-Qiang

epic.


(also known for his gunpowder paintings series.)


.

Starn Twins

Mike and Doug Starn.

I love most especially that their art is beautiful. There is a lot more to it than that - but it's still just beautiful right away.

Another really excellent thing that they do - making small things large. This among other things supports the investigative nature of photography.

I have this secret feeling that the twins are actually one person, carefully photoshopping himself into every photo an extra time. The vague rumor is that they never leave their house, perhaps really agoraphobic.. this just supports my theory. :p

Their Attracted to Light series was shown at rmcad while I was there. The handmade paper is especially nice.

Tim Hawkinson

Bird, 1997
(Made of artist's fingernail clippings)


Corner Clock, 1996


Emoter, 2002
(Moving articulated artist's face)


What I still like most about Tim Hawkinson is explanation of why his image is the source material for a lot of his work. He says that his face is "readily available" and that he "owns the sole copyright to his face", but also that in the end, the work is too abstracted to look like it even started as him.

Gary Schneider

Gary Schneider rocks.

It seems like he found a technique that worked for him in his own special way, and stuck with it for a long time. Yes, he's branched off into a number of new alternative portraits and they're pretty good as well, but his long exposure work still really kicks my brain's ass. His website is really excellent too - the writing especially.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #58

It goes without saying that most female photographers today are influenced by Cindy Sherman, whether consciously or not. The idea that she is the subject in nearly all of her work, without her photos being "self portraits," once really engaged questions about the meaning of "self" for me.

Personally, her work speaks to me more about anonymity than identity - a comparison that has become really important to my work. In any visual art, but most specifically photography, the image ceases to be a specific person and becomes a person (I recall Magritte's La trahison des images/The Treachery of Images). With this in mind I feel like Sherman's work, yes, is a photography of a character or of some constructed personality - but whether or not this is the case in all portraiture is a more interesting question.



Untitled (Woman in Sun Dress), 2003

Here more recent work just kind of freaks me out, maybe more or less than it's intended to.

Lee Miller (and Man Ray)

May Ray, more or less a surrealist, said "I paint what I cannot photograph, and I photograph what I cannot paint."
How poignant.

I would really suggest the documentary Lee Miller : Through the Mirror to anyone interested in the history of photography.

The interaction between (Elizabeth) Lee Miller and Man Ray raises questions about authorship and process in photography that I think are still relevant today. For example, Ray is credited with inventing the printing technique of solarization, when Miller in fact discovered it accidentally

Acting as Ray's model/lover/student from about 1929 to 1932, Miller often printed images from Ray's negatives, resulting at times in arguments about the authorship of the final piece.

Miller's own work, when apart form Man Ray, was considerably closer to documentary photography than to surrealism. Her image is more known than her name, but her story is what I'm really drawn to.

Bob Sabiston

Bob Sabiston (Flat Black Films) is credited for creating the rotoscoping program used in the films A Scanner Darkly and Waking life. The animation style has the effect of the photoshop "cutout" filter at times, but is all hand-drawn over video footage.

Some days, I most admire the people who make art tools. This studio includes a number of artists who, if I remember correctly, were for the most part not animators before working with Sabiston. I feel like, in a way, that creating artist software makes everything created with it into a collaboration.

Being really interested in rotoscoping, this work appeals to me more and more.

These guys make a lot of good stuff.
The Fourth Obstruction is really excellent - especially the silhouettes.

Katharina Fritsch

Katharina Fritsch, good stuff.




I first saw Kind mit Pudeln last year at the sf moma, and have been waiting to find more of Fritsch's work until now. It stuck with me for sure.. I've said it before and I'll say it again - the art world would be better if everyone could pull off the cleanliness that the minimalists did.

Sam Weber

Sam Weber, lovely illustrations.

Jerome Abramovitch

I'm really pretty into Jerome Abramovitch's work.



It's hard not to - he's doing work in a lot of realms that are already really interesting. Risky but elegant.

His mannequin series is seamless and beautiful. His site has a section of bike portraits, which are also really well done. Additionally his work includes amputees, transgendered individuals, burn victims, and fetish material. In a way I think there is an unavoidable reference to Joel Peter Witkin when photographing these subjects, although the images are handled in a completely different way.

He has covered a broad range of events in the realm of body modification. I've got to say, I'm envious of this.

He is also featured on BME, which I'd say is an honor in the body modification community. The above image is of his electively amputated finger.




These images were screencap'd from his site [sorry!] and I'd really recommend looking at more of them there.

Masahiro Mori

After seeing this graph a few years ago [thanks James!] I began to pay more attention to the level of comfort people feel around different kinds of figure-based art. Seeing Kiki Smith's Lilith at the sf moma last summer made it clear to me that seeing a life sized figure in person has an entirely different visceral impact than seeing it in photographs.

The uncanny valley graph, described by Masahiro Mori, illustrates the phenomenon of being creeped out by robots and other humanlike objects. This something that I have since been really interesting in exploiting. His book, the Buddha in the Robot, has subsequently blown my mind.










This particular page made me think pretty hard about what I'm planning on doing with an art degree. In the last year, I have focused mostly on building experimental cameras and figuring out the slow process of digital rotoscoping. This has been fun and rewarding. I have learned a lot about photography and animation, but it has been slow and hasn't ended with an incredible quantity of work. In short, building my own art implements has involved a lot of failures and a lot of wondering what the point is. I guess realistically, the processes I enjoy for making images aren't totally congruent with 'gallery art' - for a while this was a bit distressing [because that is what I'm going to school for, pretty much] but after reading Mori's ideas, I feel like this kind of art is really necessary in today's art world. The idea that our work will outlive us! In a way this is a goal and a fear of many artists. We all know the story of the artist who lived his whole life completely unrecognized, gaining appreciation only after death. The idea that the engineer or inventor could have the explicit goal of creating things purely to benefit future generations is so admirable - I wonder if Leonardo da Vinci would have ever thought that his unfinished inventions would be built centuries later on television.







Here - an example. This is me using my scanner camera, comprised of a shopping cart, pre-y2k computer, scanner, and brownie camera body. This image is a bit of a reference to Joel Peter Witkin, who I'd just met, and Sally Mann, who is a badass for using such cool big old cameras and doing wet plate photography.











Here are a few images from the scannercamera. There are quite a few, but these show some of the more interesting effects of the process..















Very few colors make it through the scan. These were all taken in color more, but appear mostly monochrome/grayscale.















Motion is distorted as the exposure takes place from one side of the picture to the other - as opposed to all at once, as with a traditional camera. Also the white blur in the center is an area of intense overexposure. This is the opposite of photo paper, interestingly enough, in that too much light on paper creates black in stead of white. This may well mean that the scannercamera image is black by default.

Jeremy Bailey

These videos are charming as hell.



The artist's presence is really apparent here [as he is in all of his own videos]. It's kind of hard to gauge the level of seriousness in each video. I'm pretty into that though.

I've heard before that it takes "a special kind of nerd" to make good art, and Bailey's a great example of this. His Video Paint programs are pretty neato, and there's a third version explanatory video. I'm always a proponent of artists making their own tools, which if you really think about it has been an important skill throughout all of art history. I think Video Paint is most exciting because I want to see if I can get my hands on a copy of it.. heh heh. :]


I feel that it's endlessly troublesome to try to repost videos though, so I'd recommend watching your fill on jeremybailey.net.

JK Keller

Also found on tomorrow and today.

Honestly, I am a little baffled about what this guy is doing. I really, really like it though. Another difficult balance in digital photography is that between the sly manipulation and the blatant one. I think most of my Anonym series [posting soon!] and how, in modern digital editing, it's entirely possible to edit an image to a point where it looks untouched - but if the process loses its apparentness, is it really successful?

The simulation becomes the real, we enter the hyperreal. :] Thanks Baudrillard.

Anyway, I feel like I see just the right amount of process here. I know what I'm looking at just enough that I'm intrigued. I could investigate further, but I don't feel like I need to in order to enjoy it. Another great example of this is Michel Gondry's video for Cibo Matto's song Sugar Water. I don't feel like I really need to dissect and fully understand the process to enjoy it. Although I could take it apart and figure it out, I think I enjoy it more without.




Keller's web site is really worth checking out. I feel like I shouldn't say too much about his art because it is fairly mysterious to me. The content and execution are really freakin' appealing though.

Lissy Laricchia

"'Get Back In Your Book' by Lissy Laricchia, is series of photos where different fairy tale characters getting sucked into their respective titles."
from tomorrow and today.

These are really beautifully surreal. As usual I am really interested in shoots where the model is not personally focused on; she is an actress, slightly anonymized. Books always attract me as subject matter/symbols. The look of these is believably traditional for the most part - if they are digitaly edited, I am not distracted by it [other than in the following photograph, the fairy is a bit much].



The rest of her work [on flickr] has a similar feel. It is kind of on the border between beautiful and cheesy - a line that I am always worried about in my own art, but also a really good place for art to be. I admire the directness of her work in this regard. Her photos are also well balanced between traditional and digital. Even where the editing is apparent, it is not overwhelming. Something about the textures and colors feels like film. I wouldn't be surprised if these were edited from scanned negatives.

The hand-crafted parts of this work are a really nice touch, especially the stars in the last image.