dayanita singh

http://www.dayanitasingh.com

The opening line on her blog is "Dayanita Singh’s File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge".  

Dayantia Singh's chair series.

This is a artist that was born in New Delhi in 1961, she still is working from there. She studied visual communication, photojournalism and documentary photography.

Her photography show a elegant and strange or unique side or view on everyday item or rooms.

Bitch Bad

This music video illustrates some of the topic that I have trouble articulating. Lupe Fiasco puts into visual context the "double entendre" of the phrase bad bitch, which has been coined by hip-hop for some decades. Though the industry is rapidly changing I feel that its safe to say hip-hop is a predominately black culture. When I reference minstrel show, this is what I mean. It also helps me interpret how to visualize the dichotomy of African American.

Jaimie Warren

Jaimie Warren is a photographer, performance artist and curator known for her theatrical, humorous self-portraits set in various scenarios and locations, whether constructed or real. Not unlike Cindy Sherman, Warren dresses herself in extensive costumes and makeup. She often imitates or references the digital presence of celebrities and internet memes.  One of her bodies of work is completely based on the website: totallylookslike.com, where people pair images of celebrities with objects, animals, food, other celebrities, etc. to show how they humorously look alike. She puts a lot of creative energy into producing her portraits without the use of Photoshop. Her work exaggerates the ridiculousness of internet celebrity obsessions to hilarious proportions. 

I appreciate the handmade, DIY quality of her costumes, makeup, sets, and props. I also like the fact that, while she references the obnoxious contemporary celebrity internet memes and photos that the internet is saturated with, she does not use contemporary technological means to achieve her photographs. I think this home-made presence in her work contrasts the air-brushed, photo-shopped celebrity glamour shots that she references. It is easier as a viewer to relate to her over-the-top hand-made spoof photos than the ubiquitous celebrity photos she's making fun of. She's a real person. 

Tony Foushe

Tony Foushe is a Canadian artist who has been working for the past 30 years, primarily in the realm of editorial and commercial photography.  He recently, however, garnered national attention and acclaim for a personal project of his revolving around heroin addicts in the Ottawa area.  This series was called "User" and featured various male and female subjects expressly for the purposes of documentation of addiction as well as empathy and the illustration of basic human emotion.






In Fouhse's sister collection, "Live Through This", he photographs one subject, Stephanie MacDonald, over a period of years in which the two developed a personal relationship with one another, even allowing Stephanie to live in his home he shared with his wife at one point.  When asked about how or why the relationship developed Fouhse expressed that normally he does not interact with his subjects, and deliberately avoids such interaction when dealing with addicts as it is often too difficult to attach emotion to the project and then, inevitably, end up in a negative situation.  Stephanie, however, was different.  As you can see in her progression, the camera captures an extreme loneliness and utter sensitivity that this woman is allowing herself to expose.  She is completely vulnerable and the immediate reaction for most is pity, however I see her as a complete warrior princess and the series as a whole being much more than a typical junkie exploitation that any teenager with an iPhone can pull off.

I am so completely drawn to this because of not only the subject matter, which I typically go for when it is done correctly, as in Larry Clark not Terry Richardson; but also because of the package as a whole.  From the title referencing the Hole album to the facial expressions and body detail of Stephanie to her clothing to the bleakness and simultaneous perfection of the piece.  The technical work is amazing.  There is no filler or hyper realism but somehow they still end up coming out pretty, and the sadness and the melancholy mixes together with intimacy and your father holding your hand on the first day of school and the viewer is wrapped up in binary emotion that ultimately feels just

right.

Adam Berg - Award Winning Director for "Philips Carousel" Cinema TV (2009)

Adam Berg is a talented Swedish video director of mostly television commercials but has a very technical and fine-art approach to the way we view film and motion. Most notably, his 2009 Phillips TV commercial "Carousel" won him the Grand Prix award, the most prestigious award within the advertising industry at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. It was the second online advertisement to win in this Film category of all time. Usually awards don't go to commercials... The release of this video was huge. In just over two weeks the short film had been viewed over half a million times online, with viewers spending an average of 5 minutes and 20 seconds on the interactive website.

Video credits.

To claim this post is really about one artist would be incorrect. Adam Berg was the director of the project but work like this takes a lot of different people. The financial situation for something like this took the backing of a London-based production company Stink Digital (where Berg was the Director). The director of photography was Fredrik Backar and the post supervisor Richard Lyons. Chris Baylis was the creative director of Tribal DDB Amsterdam (The advertising agency in charge of the advertising campaign) who worked conceptually with Berg for the idea of something cinematic like "car chases... bank robberies... heists gone wrong." My research also pointed to executive producer Mark Pytlik, who also worked along Berg and generated some ideas as well.

This 2 min and 19 second short commercial took a crew of over 100 people to build the set with 60 additional extras in the film itself to "pose" for the tracking shots. Many of these extras, as noted in the behind the stage fim seen here, were said to be stunt men and dancers who were good at holding still with good body control.

Total filming took three days. Although 90% of the short commercial was shot completely in camera with no post-production, the other 10% of post (removing wires, tracks, adding explosions, merging scenes together seamlessly, etc) took five weeks and was a very arduous process.

See more behind the scenes here.

On a personal level I'm blown away by how this video looks. It merges still photography and video motion seamlessly and is a model for what I would like to accomplish in my career at some point. This "effect" has been replicated in other films since then, but this was one of the first to do it, and do it very well.

Adam Berg is now being nominated to be the director of the film Deadpool. It is believed to have landed on 20th Century Fox’s radar as a result of his work on Carousel (source)

Kirk Crippens-by Enya Moran

Kirk Crippens is from Emeryville California and graduate from Stanford University Continuing Education. He did a series called The Great Recession: Foreclosure USA, he did this series out of complete curiosity. I really enjoy these images because they are not like normal foreclosure images that we typically see. The images tell a story, he mentions that he sees anger and frustration in the homes. Which is exactly what I see when I look at his work. I chose his work because this is the type of feeling I want to get when I look at my work, I want it to tell a story or at least give the feeling that there is a story behind the image.

http://www.kirkcrippens.com/gallery.html?folio=The%20Great%20Recession&gallery=The%20Great%20Recession%3a%20Foreclosure%2c%20USA

 Enya Moran

Todd Deutsch

has a MFA from Cranbrook Acadamy of Art in Bloomfield Hills Michigan he has shown his work nationally and internationally and it usually depicts family and boy hood things.