ARTIST LECTURE A selbe, Annie Leibovitz

If everyone has not seen this dvd yet, you must rent it and watch it. netflix baby.

I watched this "lecture", ok really it is a documentary, but anyways i watched this DVD called Life through a lens. It is able the famously accomplished photographer Annie Leibovitz. It was published in 2008 and follows Annie through some of her shoots of Kirsten Dunst for her movie and it shows Annie as they are compiling picture for a book.

Narrator: "What is a photographer's life?"

Annie : "Well, . . .It is a life living through a lens."

Annie's life was truly dedicated to photography. As a child she described moving around with her family often and seeing life through a frame ( the car window) . She started with art classes and she went on to work for Rolling Stone magazine for some time. She followed musicians and rock bands on tour becoming apart of their environment and photographing them. Annie really is one of those people who see in compositions naturally. Shooting seems to come so easily for her. She was very active and motivated and made a BIG name for herself photographing for this magazine. But she also fell into addiction of drugs after traveling with the rock bands.

She went to rehab and moved to vanity fair magazine. Her life was her work and the work she does is so amazing. Her shoots for vanity fair are wildly expensive, lavish and totally worth every penny because her shots are perfect. Annie shows photographers that with passion and a lifetime of work you can create a world for yourself.

In this documentary you get to see how she interacts with people, she is incredible engaging and is able to show the subjects vulnerability in her photographs. She is amazing a true inspiration!

ARTIST LECTURE a selbe, Simen Johan

Simen Johan was an artist who visited here within the last year and I must say I am most puzzled by his work. I listened carefully to his lecture but I found it very difficult the mental understand the ideas he was trying to describe.

Simen's work really started out working with children. He was searching to show the children creating order in chaos and trying to discover things. There are two examples of this at the top. the most amazing thing about this work is that it is collaged together. In the image of the girl she was originally a girl on a beach and the background, cigs and pig were all added together separately; I cannot image the amount of editing times these images could have needed.

He work changed to be about animals and he is trying to show the natural world has it hovered between "reality, fantasy and nightmare." This work is really just odd but one image i fell in love with is the tree at the top. In his lecture he describes it as being a monster shrouded by the heavy fog.

The three images above I picked out because they are just beautiful and they demonstrate the innocent side of Simen's work, other images show pain, and nightmare but i was more drawn to the innocence of these three images.

ARTIST LECTURE A selbe, Larry Sultan

Canal District San Rafael
2006
chromogenic print
53 x 62 inches

Larry Sultan was a visiting artist during the 2006- 2007 school year and i viewed this lecture via the VCU photography and Film online resources. I was intrigued by this artist because he didn't start out as an artist going to an art school but her was actual a political science major. He never really viewed art except what was seen in the popular culture. Starting as an artist he was interested in the ideas of the accessibility of art. Made seems to be made for art galleries to be shown in art galleries. And billboards are made to be show on the side of the road, and only on the side of the road. Sultan then started to use billboards as his canvas. He thought that he made art on a billboard that puzzled the viewer that they would take more time than the average 6 seconds to look at the board.

Using art students and free billboard space in broad daylight they would change existing advertisements. The image above of the man painting on the billboard is the favorite of mine of the ones that i saw. I think is is so funny and clever to simply erase the subject out the billboard that passersbys will be forced to look at this and wonder. His billboard art evolved and changed from this as time went on.

Sultan artwork shifted in meanings and ideas greatly. The middle image above is from a few years were Sultan was asked to photograph porn shoots. It is interested the stance he takes on this odd subject. He foucuses on the space that is being used as the set. Most of the time it is a rented house that they use to shoot in and you realize the falsity of the situation. He photographs the structure or the interesting details of the building and careful covers the necessary bodyparts so that the viewer knows what they are seeing but can't quite figure it out. The porn stars become the background and setting for the house to exist.

The top image above is from Sultan's most recent work. He works with the illegal immigrants who stand outside the hardware stores as his subjects. He pays them to be the models of this narrative that he is creating about their odd presence in the suburban world they are trying to call home. The images are really beautiful but have a sad weight to them.

I am most intrigued by his billboard work because i think that it is so accessible to the public that it has to make an impact on people who do not look or pay attention to the art world.

ARTIST LECTURE A selbe, Todd Hido

Untitled # 2690, Todd Hido, 48 x 38 inches, 2000

I watched the Todd Hido lecture from the VCU resources on the photography and film webiste. This lecture was from 2007-2008 series.

Todd Hido's education was inspired as a child by using cameras to take pictures of his toys and as a teenager BMX racer he enjoyed taking picture of his friends doing stunts and such. His first photographic education after high school was at The Art Institute of Pittsburg; the education he received there was very technical and was based mostly on learning the ins and outs of the equipment before advancing to use it artistically. I feel that this is very evident in his traditional formal compositions that are seen in his work.

Todd Hido spend a lot of time on shooting houses at night. These seemingly vacant neighborhoods show evidence of human life by the one or two lights on within a house. I really like this photography because Hido uses all natural light in an amazing way. Through long exposures he captures the sterile vacant environment that is suburbia at nighttime. The only evidences of life are the glowing windows and the horizon glow that come from light pollution. We know there are people there but it seems so empty and vacant; almost emotionless. Emotionless is the wrong word. The darkness in the images is so thick and the surreal appearance becomes heavy on the viewer, making them numb to observe the evidence of life and suggested emotion.

I connect with this work because it is beautiful to look at and the colors of the images are deep and saturated when there is color in these nighttime images. They are reminiscent of sneaking out of the house as a teenager and experiencing the true silence of a suburban neighborhood completely asleep with the fear of being caught by the one person that is still awake with the light one.