Lou Bopp

Lou Bopp's website says he is a "commercial location photographer." The website's "About" section describes him as a "big shot NYC photographer with Midwestern roots with a resume every kid (...) in America would die for."

I'd say that's probably accurate. He's worked for almost every big-name client you can think of off the top of your head. In his series "Blues Musicians," however, Bopp got personal and intimate with photography and music. He traveled the Blues Highway (Route 61 South from Memphis) to track down and document the last living blues musicians in Mississippi who shaped the genre in America.

According to an article about the series on Feature Shoot, Bopp also documented the remaining culture of the blues in Mississippi in addition to shooting portraits of the musicians. He photographed the roadhouses and bars that supported the music, using only natural light and no assistants.

I was interested in this series because music photography is what initially inspired me to learn photography years ago. I really enjoy Bopp's approach because he photographed a decent amount of musicians, and made use of some very interesting locations to add to the story each photo is trying to tell about those musicians. He seamlessly combines locations, various people, textures, and color palettes to effectively convey a certain mood in each image, which I think are all important parts of documentary portraiture.

Un Petit Monde: Kurt Moses

Un Petit Monde is the name of the series Kurt Moses has created where he arranges tiny people in a larger-than-life world. Moses does not use tilt-shit photography or Photoshop, rather, he sets up his everyday scenes in the real world using natural light. The photographer, loves telling stories through his works, which he wants others to help him actively create. “My goal is simple," he says, "initiate a storyline and capture an evocative photo that allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the scenes they are observing.”
http://www.kurtco.com/

Leo Caillard - Art Games

      Leo Caillard is a 30 year old French photographer. He graduated from Gobelins school of Visual Communication in 2008. After graduating he came to the U.S. and spent a year there before going back home and starting his series "Art Games".
     I choose this series because I like how he combined art with technology. The way that he combined the art work with technology make me think of this like a virtual tour through the Louvre. I also like how he shows the way that people interact with the art work now.
http://www.leocaillard.com/

Michael Kenna is one of the most popular and influential landscape photographers of the last 50 years. His unique minimalist imagery has inspired many, and earned him a huge and loyal following. Fans of Kenna's photography will be delighted to learn of his 1st major retrospective exhibition in London.
Michael Kenna looks for interesting compositions and arrangements within the natural landscape. He is drawn to certain times of day and night, preferring to photograph in the mist, rain and snow clear blue sky and sunshine do not inspire him. He only photographs his work in black and white, as he believes that,
 "Black and white is immediately more mysterious because we see in colour all the time. It is quieter than color."

I chose these photos because of the specific look that the artist has to the landscape and urban areas.  Some reduction and deletion has occurred in these photos. Deletion of color and all the elements of daily life. This can give a specific feature to these places to make them different and separate form normal every day seen places. The  artist made his own landscape and his own city. There is a mysterious feeling in these photos that can be the result of the deletion of color, and as  the artist said  by these reductions the photos become quiet.

 


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Corine Vermuelen is a Dutch Artist working in Detroit,  and had set up a pop up portrait studio and documented people who came in from off the street. I hope to be able to set up multiple pop up studio's across the Metro Detroit area to be able to document many different people from around the area in hopes to capture the different sub cultures of fashion and popular culture influences.

Jaejin Hwang

I found Hwang's series Asleep interesting. The series tries to show the ambiguous distinction between a peaceful death and falling asleep with the approach of random and natural things that occur in our daily lives. Some of the images are move obvious when it comes to determining if it is asleep or had a "peaceful death," but some left you wondering which one it could be. The tree images were the most powerful in that aspect in my opinion because of the eerie feeling they give off.
Being able to show a difference between falling asleep and a peaceful death in subtle ways is inspiring for me, based on my project on daydreams. I wanted to combine both reality with the daydream. I had a more straight forward approach to the concept where Hwang had a subtle approach.

Whilst I am Drawing Breath

 Whilst I am Drawing Breath, Amy Elkins
Amy is a photographer born in 1979 living in the Los Angles area. She earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Her most recent work deals a lot with male gender identity through topics of athleticism and dance. She won the Aperture prize with her long-tern project Black is the Day, Black is the Night, which explores masculinity and vulnerability of men serving life and death row sentences at prisons in the U.S.

Though there was no artist statement about the series I chose to write about, I was able to conjure up my own thoughts on the work. I think it relates to the type of work I hope to make in that is about the personal experience, identity, transitory states and vulnerability. The title "Whilst I am Drawing Breath" suggests the importance of the current moment; her life the way she sees it at this moment in time and everything that comes with being alive and breathing. In these images, I think it is obvious that she is not really optimistic. She has constant thoughts of wanting to be somewhere else, or maybe even be someone else. Even so, she chooses to make images of her life the way it is and about her feelings the way they are. The rest of the series is very dream-like and gives me the feeling of sitting around, staring out a window into nothingness.