Megan McIsaac

Megan McIsaac, originally from the Metro Detroit area, lived and created images in Portland, OR, for several years before her recent move to Los Angeles, where she lives and works as a freelance photographer.

Her work is diverse, ranging from portraits to landscapes to fashion photographs and self-portraits, and is shot almost entirely on a medium-format Mamaiya using Kodak Portra film. Her images are incredibly casual with a classic appeal. In spite of their straightforward aesthetic, her photographs are also captivating and often haunting. Her portraits all seem to capture the subject at just the right moment, as do her landscape images.

Anton Gottlob

Gottlob is a German photographer from Cologne.  He works mainly with portraits, some documentary and some constructed.  The series I'm most interested in is called, "Work & Travel," which is a series of photographs of "Liebesmobilen" or "Love Mobiles" in Cologne, Germany.  There is apparently a big business of traveling prostitutes there, and they ride around in these trailers, assumingly conducting their work there as well.  The series has only a small artist statement, saying, "Für viele Menschen seien sie ein Symbol von Freiheit und Mobilität. Für Gottlob-Schoenenberg sind diese Liebesmobile ein Symbol von Verlorenheit." which basically means, "For a lot of people, [trailers] are a symbol of freedom and mobility.  These love trailers are a symbol of forlornness."


http://www.bildwerk3.de/2015/03/24/duestere-und-trostlose-fotografien-von-wohnanhaengern-in-denen-prostituierte-ihrer-arbeit-nachgehen/

http://www.antongottlob.com/

Clyde Butcher

Clyde Butcher was inspired by Ansel Adams' work and then quit working in the architectural field and got into landscape photography. He's done a lot of work dealing with landscape in the States, but has done much of his work in Florida.

He will most likely use an 8x10 view camera, but will change the size depending on what he's shooting.

"I try to use the largest film possible for the particular subject I'm planning to photograph. So, if I have a huge, broad landscape, I use the 12x20" view camera. If I am photographing something like the Ghost Orchid I use a 4x5" view camera," Butcher says.

His work interests me because I am interested in landscape photography and how he makes all these landscapes seem mysterious, as if they have a story to tell. I would like my work to reflect this in a way, make you question whats going on, what is this about, what is about to happen.

Most of his images are brighter scenes, but there are a few that have a lot of contrast and it relates to how my recent work has been. Knowing that he does this in film inspires me because he does all of his work in the darkroom, compared to how I am doing this on a computer to create the same effect, which is a lot more work.

Robert Larson

Robert Larson is a young Los Angeles-based documentary photographer and photojournalist. His work has been featured by the New York Times LENS Blog, the Los Angeles Times, PDN, and others.

Following the 2010 Haitian earthquake, Larson packed up and went to Haiti to document the tragedy and help the world understand the magnitude of what had happened to the people there. In one interview, Larson mentioned that prior to his trip to Haiti, he had never enjoyed photographing much during his travels. Having worked as a travel photographer's assistant prior to the earthquake, he had never felt an emotional connection to his work.

In 2007, he photographed the death of his beloved dog and also began to photograph his grandparents. It was during these projects that he began to form a sense of purpose and develop a personal voice within his work. When the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, he knew he had to photograph it.

Beyond Waiting for Haiti and Grandma and Grandpa, other projects Larson has gained national attention for over the past several years include his series The Food Runner, documenting his real-life experience working in the Los Angeles restaurant industry, as well as The Summer of Our Lives, documenting youth culture and experiences in Southern California.

Sebastiao Salgado: Genesis

This Brazilian photographer, led a life photographing harsh realities and wars. He became ill and in order to heal himself, set out on an 10 year journey to capture the last humanities of the world. I feel that Salgado’s collection is strong and beautiful. Just knowing that these are the last images he plans on taking before he retires is powerful in the sense that he wants to see good and beauty in the world so he went on an elaborate trip just to find it.

Watch him explain Genesis here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJWgQxTous

Watch his TEDx video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH4GAXXH29s 

       

 Marcela Paniak

Entering Marcela Paniak's visual universe is something of an extraordinary journey. This young Polish photographer skillfully uses “intermediality” and plays with photography as an artifact or a materialized souvenir. Memory and its process are at the center of her work, suitable for introspection. What is drawn out of it is a moving innocence, an overwhelming and almost unreal feeling of nostalgia.(http://www.photography-magazine.net/interviews/sensorial-experiment-memory-marcela-paniaks-sound-and-photomontages)
This is how the artist describe her work: " Discovered objects have their own memory. Although in their degraded and deprived form, they may have lost their original individuality, they still store in themselves a part of history. In my photographs, I am attempt to stop time—if only for an instant—to allow these old elements to gain new form." (https://www.lensculture.com/articles/marcela-paniak-rediscovered-objects-giving-new-life-to-the-past#slide-8)

These photos look pretty simple. Just some objects on a flat background. But the artist  made some decisions that  gave a specific  quality to these photos, such as textures in the background, black and white photos, and  putting different parts of different objects together to make a new object. Every piece of each object  has come from a different place and has its own story, and we can see all these different stories coming together and fixed in the photographs. With this view, she successfully played with the concept of time and history. It seems that time is fixed, and the objects  frozen in these  photos.

Link to artist's website:
http://marcepani.art.pl/index.php?i=przedmioty&lang=en

Evan Baden

Evan Baden is a American Photographer who in 2014 received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Baden's work has been featured in many publications such as Time, The Guardian, and New York Magazine. I came across Baden's work in File Magazine on his photo series The Illuminati 

This series highlights the consumption of technology by the youth in America. Baden poses the question with this series do we consume technology or has technology consumed us?