Irving Penn

Irving Penn was born in 1917 New Jersey and died in 2009. Penn studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, under the tutelage of Alexey Brodovitch who was a Russian graphic designer. In 1953 Penn established his own studio were he photographed a number things including still life and portraiture.

Penn has been one of photography’s conspicuous innovators in the two oldest and most successful genres; still life and portraiture. It is unusual for an artist to be so comfortable in both of these genres But that’s what was so special about Penn, he had the ability to photograph amazing still life and portraits.

One of my favorite and most inspiring still life’s that Penn did was the cigarette. Penn found his subject matter just outside on the street. He then took these cigarette ends into his studio to photograph.      Penn transformed one of the most consumed and discarded products from consumer society and turned it into something beautiful. Penn photographed the cigarettes using the platinum palladium process. By using this prose Penn has made something as insignificant as a cigarette butt, and made it into and object of desire.

 

Laura Letinsky

Laura Letinsky is a cotempary artist /photographer who was born in Winnipeg, Canada. She is now currently a professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts.

Letinsky has been developing her style since the late 90s. 17th Century Renaissance painting has influenced her throughout her work. Using a large format camera letinsky creates these stunning images of what looks like the after mouth of a meal. Letinsky creates her images in a controlled studio environment were she smashes fruit and spills wine.

This effect of the destroyed dinner table give the work a Memento mori feel to it. The big empty space in the images gives them a sense of emptiness. Memento mori means ‘remember that you must die’ so the empty whit in the images to me fells like that is the lose of someone and the leftover food is what has been left behind.

I really like the work of Letinsky I think that her images are simple but very effective. Also I think that her images are full of meaning and the sense that everything must come to an end.

Still Life

In one of our practical lessons we learned some handy tricks on how to photograph glass. We started off by setting up a table with a soft box directly behind it. We then set the camera up on one of the studio tripods that was then pointing into the flash. After setting up the camera we then took our first meter reading. When we had the reading we had to close the aperture down by two more stops because we were shooting into the light.

This was the first shot that I took. It is correctly exposed and looks ok but you cant really see the glass very well.

To make the glass more visible there is a handy little trick. If you get two bits of black card and place them ether side of the glass object. The reflection on the glass will show the outline of the bottle or vase that you are photographing.

This is the setup that I had for my shoot. Also to get this affect i have placed the object on a sheet of glass this then gives it the mirrored effect hat is shown in the image above. To finish the image off you then take it into photoshop and crop the image so you can no longer see the black borders. You are then left with a long image like this.

 

 

 

 

Keith Arnett

Keith Arnett was a well-known conceptual artist before he seriously picked up a camera. Although he is not that well known for is photography there was one project that he did called ‘Pictures From A Rubbish Tip’ that interested me. Arnett has taken these abstract photos looking in rubbish bags on a tip. Discussing as it sounds the way that he has taken these photos is amazing. When you first look at his images the colors are stunning. It is only until you get up really close that you relies wheat the image are actually of.

I like the images that Arnett has taken here but they are quite repulsive when you take a closer look. It is quite interesting to think that all of the junk and rubbish that is in this place once use to be in our homes. What Arnett has made me relies is that everything comes to an end and things that we once used to hold deer eventually become obsolete.

Not all of the mages that he took were at the rubbish tip he sometimes photographed in the studio. By photographing some of the rubbish in his studio Arnett has taken something that s literally rubbish and made it beautiful again.

The First Still Life

Photography’s first still life was a picture of a table set for a small meal. A French photographer called Nice Phore Nirpce made this photograph in about 1827. This was years before the world new there was such thing as photography.  

Here is the photograph. It is a very simple idea but is very effective. For saying that this the first recorded image of a still life set up, I think that the photographer has focused more on recording the image than making a statement on the genre of still life.

 

Still Life

Still life is a photograph, painting or drawing of an inanimate object or arrangement of objects. An example of this would be John Blakemore and his studies of tulips. The term Still Life comes from the Dutch ‘stilleven’ witch became current from about 1650 as a collective name for this genre of art.