What Photography Means to Me

      This image I selected from Annie Leibovitz's work stood out most to me due to its simplicity. A lot of Annie Leibovitz's portraits are very elaborate. This image, however, had no extravagant setup, was rather simple, yet still captivating. The lack of fancy setwork and editing in this photograph sets it apart instantly to me from a lot of Annie Leibovitz's other photographs. The way in which Annie Leibovitz placed so much focus on the subject's eyes is really what drew me in as a viewer.  Despite all the chaos and messiness of the subject's hair in this image, her eyes remain still, locked on the camera.      The intense stare of the subject, while everything around her is somewhat messy, also conveys a story element in this portrait. The steadiness of the subject's eyes, to me, is somewhat representative of a calmness within a storm. While everything else is uncontrolled and wild about this portrait, the subjects gaze remains constant and calm. ...

       When I was deciding what photographer I wanted to use as inspiration for my portraits, I actually based it off of what self-portrait photographer interested me most. I was most interested by the work of photographer, Lee Friedlander, when it came to learning about self-portraits. That being said, when it came to looking for a photographer as inspiration for my portrait photography, I wanted to find a photographer who's work I thought closely resembled that of Lee Friedlander. I decided upon the photographer, Irving Penn. The majority, if not all, of Penn's photographs are in black and white, similar to the work of Friedlander. This black and white look was something I carried into my own portraits. I think utilizing black and white, for Penn's portrait shown above, created a very dramatic effect that would not have been achieved if the images were in color, since it works hand in hand with the variation in lighting in this image.     Something I...

  .               When looking through the various photographers whose work focused on self-portraits, I was most drawn to the work of Lee Friedlander.  One thing that stood out to me most about Friedlander's work was that nearly all of his photographs are in black and white. Several of the other photographers had work featuring colors and vibrancy, while virtually all of Lee Friedlander's most recognized works have no color. While the majority of Friedlander's images have no color, he does utilize light in many of his photographs, which, in a sense, provides an aspect of color to his photography. The varying degrees of light in different areas of his photographs produce variations in the shades of black and white that his photos contain. The two Friedlander photos I selected above both incorporate light in the photograph that allows for variation in the colors seen in the images, despite them being in black and white. The areas in ...

     Upon reading Fred Ritchin's After Photography,  three quotations in particular caught my attention. The first quotation that I found quite interesting was, "Rather than a 'decisive moment' selected from an advancing continuum, the digital photograph can acknowledge a more elastic sense of time, where future and past can intertwine and be as decisive as the present..." I found this quote to be extremely profound in its description of the role of the digital photograph. This particular quote explains how a digital photograph can do much more than just depict a moment in time; it can also be used to compare the past and present, or show change over time. This also makes clear that when used alongside other digital photographs from various points in time, a digital photograph can depict growth and change, and even compare people or places decades or centuries apart. This quote emphasizes that the role of digital photography goes far beyond just capturing one mo...