For the third exhibition assignment, I would like to mention Joshua Lutz’s “Hesitating Beauty” which is exhibited on ClampArt Gallery in Chelsea. The subject of the exhibition is truth and reality, by using a collection of 18 photographs portrait Lutz’s mother who suffers from mental illness. Instead purely showing 18 straight forward portraits, he also includes other persons, self portrait, mailbox in a snow scene, exit sign and other photographs. He plays with our conception of reality to show the audience his own experience growing up in such a family, where his mother’s illness also affects other family members.

The exhibition is organized chronologically. The pictures show photographer’s mother from young to old with time passes by. Also with time slipped away, the mental illness of his mother changed from aggressive paranoia and depression to calming sense of delusion. This change “made it much easier for me to rid the anger that veiled my life and to attempt to find a place of empathy and compassion as I managed her care (Joshua Lutz).”

When he was a child, his way of interpreting the world was largely affected by her illness. She would try to figure out the pattern of the numbers on a license plate, and screwed loose the phone to check whether there was a recording bug. Joshua as a child was unsure of the reality and the rest of the world. Uncertainty and insecurity also became major problems of him. Fortunately, he has not developed serve mental conditions as he gradually growing up.

The first image interests me is the second image among the exhibition. It is titled “The Coming Insurrection”. No detailed description was found. In this image, a young woman (assume is his mom) with her eyes closed and mouth opened express a huge joy on her face. I think this was when she had not been tortured yet by the aggressive mental disorder and was still a happy and healthy lady. This one is also one of the most important components of the show because the audience is able to see the gradual transaction of motions shifting since then on.

The 11^th photo on the exhibition, the “Exit 17” also is one of my favorite. The exit sign is put in the middle of a forest or wetland, with no real exit out. This is a metaphor of the mother’s mental condition went into the worst period and it shows how frustrated and desperate the whole was put into.

Last but not the least is the 13^th photo “Do Not Wake”. It is also a very powerful image. An old lady with gray hair closes her eyes. Her eye brows are frown, and she gets a respirator in her mouth. She is in pain. A small note of “Do not wake” is stuck on the respirator. Here the photographer (her son) is actually playing a little bit humor as he also hangs a slice of paper written “solo **(sorry, cannot read it clearly)” at where the infusion usually be. However, I cannot feel the humor, but only sarcasm as I can see his mom is in so much pain and he is making a joke. But this might be a must as a way of expression.

What I have learned from visiting the exhibition is that Lutz tells a story of his family both subjectively and objectively. He featured his mother’s struggle as well as his own, which was painful. However, he tries to be calm and explain it using photos in a calm and sarcastic way. This teaches me that family struggle could be a good topic to explore. Things that not pretty or we would not initially want to share with others might always contain truth and reality.

Image I made:

“Bill Brandt, Shadow and Light”

It is known that light and shadow are the main tools of photography, but being able to manipulate with that light and placing the shadow in a unique position and choosing an angle that what makes photography an ART, and that’s what makes Bill Brandt to be a recognized photographer, whose works are presented in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The exhibition “Bill Brandt, Shadow and Light” is a collection of photographs from 1930s to early 60s that are organized in different sections based on the time, place, and concept of the photographs. The selection of Brandt’s works are organized in a certain way that the viewer will see two different styles of photography combined in one artist. From one perspective it is a documentary photography, from the other it is more artistic. It is a great example of an artistic journalist, who spend years of his life to create his unique style of photography and print. Following the modernist traditions along with his extraordinary vision, Brandt presents this secular world in a different and complex way.

Along with the abstract and artistic works of Brandt, the exhibit also includes the magazines and journals, where his works have been published. Being an artist and journalist, Brandt still was distinguishing a gap between the invention (of art) and representation (of reality). He wrote in 1948: “Vicariously, through another person’s eyes, men and women can see the world anew… There is given to them again a sense of wonder. This should be the photographer’s aim, for this is the purpose that pictures fulfill in the world as it is to-day… We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with idea, to stand and stare.”

Brandt established his name as a photographer before World War II and his was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to take pictures of the improvised shelters during the first German raids on London in 1940. Brandt photographed in different stations, basements, shops, places where people were trying to find a shelter using an artificial light to depict the crowded and overloaded by Londoners spaces.

Liverpool Street Underground Tation Shelter is a photograph that shows the condition of people that had not choice as to hide in the underground.  The rows of people settle down for the night in the ‘disused and incomplete’ sections of the Central line extension. Brandt shows the atmosphere he described as ‘intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores’.

Liverpool Street Underground Station Shelter. 1940. Gelatin Silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz in honor of Peter Galassi.

If the photographs from London established Brandt as a photojournalist, the nudes that were produced by him later added to his documentary style the artistic touch. By using wide- angle, fixed -focus camera designed to photograph the crime scenes, Brandt chose strange angles to emphasis the camera’s ability to the world the way human eye cannot. By distorting the reality he has created a surreal world of human body with a concentration on knees, breasts, elbows and feet.

Nude. London. 1950. Vintage Gelatin Silver Print.

Among his nudes and documentary works the Brandt’s collection of close-up images of wrinkled eyes gives sense of his photography. The concept behind this collection is the vision. Since all the photographs are the eyes of famous painters and sculptor, Brandt wants to emphasis the idea that the vision of the artist is the most important thing, that what helps them to make their art, that what helps them to see the world they another people don’t see, the unique part of body that makes our life unique. The photograph below is the eye of a famous English sculptor and artist Henry Moore.

Henry Moore. 1960. Gelatin silver print. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edwynn Houk.

The image below is the photograph that i have taken being inspired by the nude collection of Brandt.

Lines. New York. 2013

1.   What is the subject of the exhibition?
The subject of the exhibition is “After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age”.

2.   What does the exhibit have to say about the subject?
The exhibition is located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition explores various ways in which all the artists, including Nancy Burson, Filip Dujardin, Joan Fontcuberta, Beate Gütschow, and others, have used digital technology to alter their photographic works from the 1980s to the present.

It is no doubt that the digital photography has taken away many inconveniences that film photography has, which allows more and more people have the ability to get involve into photography. “Just press the shutter, the digital sensor and the processor will do the rest for you.” However, digital photography is not about capturing only. It also contains a very important process called retouching.

3.   How is the exhibit organized, and what does that organization tell you about the show’s subject?
There are approximately 20 more works from different artists being showed and they are very well organized. For the past twenty years, photography has go through a dramatic transformation. Mechanical cameras and silver-based film have been replaced by electronic image sensors and microchips. Instead of shuffling through piles of glossy prints, we stare at the glowing screens of laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Negative enlargers and chemical darkrooms have given way to personal computers and image-processing software. Photographers have always used manual techniques to alter their images, but digital cameras and applications such as Adobe Photoshop have made the process quicker, easier, and more accessible to many more people—both amateurs and professionals—than ever before.

4.   Choose at least three highlights from the exhibit that are interesting to you and that somehow exemplify the show. For each work, provide the designer/creator’s name, the date of the work, a brief description of the piece, your thoughts about why the work interests you, and you idea of how the work reflects the show’s subject.

Nancy Burdon, “Warhead 1″, 1982

Burdon was among the first artists to apply digital technology to the genre of photographic portraiture. In the late 1970s she began working with computer scientist at MIT, to develop software that could be used to “age” a human face. By the early 1980s she was digitally blending the faces of group of individuals. This picture above was created using images of five world leaders , each represented proportionally by the number of nuclear warheads deployable by the nation they led: Ronald Reagan (55%), Leonid Brezhnev (45%), Margaret Thatcher (less than 1%), Francois Mitterand (less than 1%), and Deng Xiaoping (Less than 1%).

Portrait (Hals), Jason Salavon  (American, born 1970)

Date: 2009 Medium: Chromogenic print Dimensions: Image: 101.6 x 76.2 cm (40 x 30 in.) Frame: 102.2 × 83.2 cm (40 1/4 × 32 3/4 in.)

Using software he designs himself, Salavon produces typological averages of related images such as Playboy centerfolds, high-school yearbook portraits, and Old Master paintings. To create this photograph, which was inspired by the Metropolitan Museum’s Dutch Golden Age painting galleries, the artist gathered high-quality reproductions of portraits by Frans Hals. He then used an open-source programming language to generate the paintings’ mathematical average. The result is an impressionistic composite that reveals the hidden norm lurking within the Dutch master’s oeuvre.

110 Junction, Matthew Porter  (American, born State College, Pennsylvania, 1975)

Inspired by chase scenes in 1960s and 1970s action movies and television shows such as Bullitt, The Streets of San Francisco, and The Dukes of Hazzard, Porter’s photographs of floating muscle cars are captivatingly implausible. The vehicles are die-cast models that the artist shoots in his studio, mimicking the lighting conditions of the backgrounds into which they are inserted. Here, a 1970 Plymouth GTX hovers above a hazy streetscape near downtown Los Angeles, glinting in the late afternoon sun like a modern-day winged chariot.

“The 49 States”, Matthew Jensen  (American, born 1980)

For The 49 States, Jensen traveled virtually through the continental United States by means of Google Street View, an online mapping tool that provides 360-degree panoramic views of locations throughout the world. The artist chose one image from each of the forty-nine states covered by Street View when he was working on the project, using image-processing software to adjust color and contrast, straighten perspectives, and fill in gaps. The resulting images are ordered alphabetically by state abbreviation. The square format recalls the look of color snapshots made with instamatic cameras in the 1960s, when American vacationers took to the roads in record numbers. While the work memorializes the age of the great American road trip, it also signals a new understanding of the landscape as a virtual space to be explored by the armchair traveler parked in front of a computer.

5.   What did you learn from the exhibition?

Today, the manipulation of photographic images is ubiquitous—in magazines and advertising, in police work and medical imaging, and increasingly in the snapshots of vacations, weddings, and graduations that we email to friends and family and upload to social-networking websites. It is not surprising that artists have seized upon these new tools to realize their visions and to spur reflection on the medium’s past, present, and future. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs and video in which artists have used digital technology to modify and transform the camera image or, in some cases, to generate convincingly realistic photographs with no real-world counterparts. Whether imagining alternate realities, reinterpreting classic works of art, or exuberantly defying the laws of gravity, these artists and others are pointing the way toward a new conception of photography as a malleable medium with an exquisitely complex relationship to visual truth.

6.  Finally, create a picture that is inspired by an image or idea in the exhibit. Include the picture you made in your blog post.

Original Picture:

After Photoshop manipulate:

Rubin Museum of Art: Living Shrines of Uyghur China By Lisa Ross

Living Shrines of Uyghur China is one of the exhibiton at Rubin Museum of Art now. It is photography by Lisa Ross which is a New York based photographer. Lisa Ross spent couple years at Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which is China’s largest province. At there, she had a close view of the life in Uyghur Autonomous Region. Lisa’s work most focus on region, culture and so on.The life of people in Xinjiang is really different with people around other place of China. XinJiang was one of the important place of Silk Road. It is the area which connect the West and East. From the long long ago, the business men set Xinjiang as an important trade center in that time. People not only brought product for sale, but also inport  their culture.Uyghur culture is mixing with Wester and Easter culture. Also, the outlook of the Uyghur people like the mix with Wester and Easter. I think the cross culutre characteristics is one of the important things attract Lisa Ross to have project on it.

In the exhibition, LIsa Ross not only present the images of her, but also the video which regular to her idea of Living Shrines of Uyghur China. The video is present at the center of the exhibition. When people walk down and enter into the room, they can see the movie presenting. Lisa Ross video caught the taklimakan desert which the largest desert in Xinjiang. In the center of the exhibition, there are two walls which contain the introduction of the exhibition and some information about the Xinjiang. Both of them provide rich information to audiences. Also at one of the corner of the exhibition, Lisa Ross provides a computer there which use a different way present some of her works. Those images are what she saw or maybe what she eat at Xinjiang. You can choose what kind of tranportation to travel Xinjiang. Like if you choose Motorcycle, you can see set of images which Xinjiang people stand beside their Motorcycle. LIfe style of Xinjiang people present to all the audiences.

The three side of walls present the major works of Lisa Ross. Don’t like the images in the computer, there are no people at those images. The desert is the major theme of those images. Not only the desert, but also the death. The burial marker is what she shoot at this set of photos.The color of those images are very nice. Yellowish brown is the major color of those images. It really represent the geomography location of Xinjiang where has large area of desert.

Black garden ( An offering ) 2009 is one of the images which attract my eye balls. I saw this image on the exhibition page at Rubin Museum of Art before i went to the museum. It also the front page of Lisa Ross’s book Living Shrines of Uyghur China which present all her works from Xinjiang. In the images, there is one big mazar with colorful flags in the center of the image. behind it, there are more mazar with colorful flags on the desert in the images. At the deserction of the images, she mention about the size of mazar. The mazar are really small, however we can see it is really big to audience. It is the magice of the photographer. The ground is caught in the image too. We can assume Lisa Ross probably placed her camera on the ground and shoot from the bottom of mazar to the top. So it makes mazar look like very big. The image has very narrow of DOF. She only make one mazar very out standing in the images. It seems really work.

On the one side of wall, i quite interested at those two images. Those two images are set of images of crib like burial markers. They are Unrevealed, site 4 (yellow marker) and Unrevealed, site 4 (colored cribs).At the first time looking at those images, really love the light of those two images. Also color is very comfortable and soft. Before reading the desceription of the images, i had not idea what those crib doing.The color and light of those images not create the feeling of burial markers.The colored cribs is the image which have not only one crib like burial markers in the images. Those cribs are in the little bit lower of the middle of the image. They have different kind of color. The verticality lank poplar trees behind those cribs become the background and make the image going on the direction from the bottom to top and up to a very far place. Lisa Ross really did a good job. She makes the thought of audience breaking the frame of image and deeply into the image. If the colored ribs is the big picture of those burial markers, the yellow marker will be the detail of the burial markers. The audiences have more close to those burial makers. Only one crib like burial markers in the 2/3 place of the image. We can see the very smooth sky on the top of the “crib”. From the sky to the ground, shrubbery grows around the “crib” , also inside the crib.plastic bag wrapped around the “crib”.Lisa Ross explains to us the plastic bag once held corn and rice left by pligrims to keep the spirtis happy and protect the dead. The statement beside the images seem really help for audience to understand some meaning inside the photos.

Lisa Ross really did a good job on her LIving Shrines of Uyghur China. The photos are very nice and in some sense presenting the life style of Xinjiang people. I really love the color of this set of photos. “Crib” set of photo is presenting a human from baby which use crib and the end of the life death. They are not only the images of desert. The audience may really confuse what those mazar for. The statement helps for some but not that detail. This set of images have power to direct the audience to find out something inside of those images.

For my second museum report, I chose to go to the Rubin Museum of Art for the “Living Shrines of Uyghur China: Photographs by Lisa Ross” exhibit. I didn’t know this museum existed so I chose to go here instead of seeing the other ones at the Met or Moma, where I have been before.

Lisa Ross was one of the few westerners that were able to get access to the remote area of China in the Taklamakan Desert where the shrines were set-up. Called mazars, these sacred burial sites were established to honor the lives of Muslim saints. Her photographs show no people, only the shrines that were built with different kinds of memorabilia either attached or around these sites. Her photographs are also a pleasant escape from the media which has demonstrated much violence from the same area of China.

Through Lisa Ross’s images, they show a tradition for the natives of the Taklamakan Desert and how they commemorate saints. In addition, women would also come to these sacred locations with illnesses or fertility issues searching for help. From this exhibit, I gained a connection Lisa Ross and the Chinese people had with these statures. It felt very spiritual and peaceful.

When you first entered the space of the exhibit, one of Lisa Ross’s videos was front and center. It was of one of the mazars in the desert. I started by going to the left and the images were close-ups of different mazars. I believe by having the close-ups of the mazars on the left side when you first walked in was a good choice because it helped me acclimate myself to the purposes of the mazars. As I walked around (which was to the right of the video) were images of mazars up close, but also farther away too. Also on the left side in the middle of the exhibit was a glass case of qorchaqs (dolls that represented the human body) that were brought to the sites by mostly women who had illnesses, fertility issues or wanting to get rid of an evil spirit. I wish that the introduction label was closer to the front somewhere, but if you entered the exhibition from the other side by the staircase, it would be considered to be in the front.

My favorite image from the exhibit was ‘Unrevealed, Site 3 (Ladder), 2009’ which was a close-up of one of the mazars. I was drawn to this one because of the colorful pieces of cloth hanging from it along with all the sticks sticking out of it on top. From the the image label, it says that ladders attached to the mazars symbolize the bridge between earth and heaven. The label also mentioned that because of all the colorful fabrics hanging from the mazar, this demonstrates the cultural crossroads of the Uyghur Autonomous Region. This spoke to me because this image seemed unlike any of the others through the exhibit. The other mazars were not heavily as draped as this one so it did stand out as a mecca of mazars.

The second piece I chose to highlight was the ‘Womb and Fetus, 2009’ which was one of the qorchaqs found around the sacred mazars. This doll was used to help women with fertility issues and you can see the correlation because the figure attached to the qorchaq is of a pregnant woman.

The third piece I chose was ‘Unrevealed, Site 4 (Colored Cribs), 2009’ which was the first image I saw when I entered the exhibit. I was drawn to the bright colors of the mazars surrounding the tall, skinny trees that enveloped the background. The contrast of the leaves from the trees, to the tree trunk and then to the colorful cribs was very eye-catching. The image label also discussed how the contrast offers “an intense and direct experience.” I believe this showcased a different area of the mazars that were placed closer to trees rather than in the desert.

Overall, this exhibition was very interesting. I would have enjoyed being Lisa Ross and being able to have the opportunity to photograph these sacred sites. Through her images, I was able to see and learn about the mazars and qorchaqs and their purposes. It was a very spiritual exhibit which I felt it exuded from the images. Since China is so massive, I didn’t know this desert or area existed so I am happy just to learn more about the world as well. And I am grateful I learned about their traditional customs before learning about the violence that goes on the area.

I will be updating my post later on this evening with my image that I took that was inspired by my visit to this exhibit.

Pace/MacGill Gallery: Richard Misrach

On the Beach 2.0 exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery showcases Richard Misrach’s large-scale photography that gives the viewers a bird’s-eye view of the landscape surrounding us. For this exhibition, Misrach continues to explore the same landscapes that he has chased after for the past ten years of his career. But instead of using his 8×10″ view film camera that he has in the past, Misrach for On the Beach 2.0 switches to a digital camera with fast shutter speed and high resolution to capture genuine images surfers, beach goers, and the gradual changes of the weather from far away without the subjects’ knowledge.

The title of the exhibition is also a nod to Misrach’s change to digital photography. The 2.0 component  serves as a commentary to the technical advancement in the history of photography, as well as the shifts in Misrach’s personal works. With a digital camera, Misrach is able to take photographs from the balcony of his hotel in Hawaii without compromising the sharpness of the images, while capturing the fast, gestural portraits of his subjects like a woman doing a handstand on her surf board or a man sunbathing with a magazine covering his face.

Richard Misrach
Untitled

Richard Misrach
Untitled
2012

By photographing the subjects from far away, Misrach is making humans a small objects in the overall landscape. The surfer, from far away, resembles much of a pole in the midst of the blue ocean, while the sunbather becomes a static fixture in the vast area of sand.

Misrach’s photographs also focuses on the changes in the ocean’s colors according to the time of day. From far away, the photographs of the tides and waves look nothing more than an zoomed-in image of the ocean, but when one takes a closer look, Misrach’s landscape can be easily mistaken for a painting. The transition of the colors is obvious, yet fluid, allowing the viewer to delineate patches of blues and greens within the organic shapes made by the ocean tides. Due to the large size of Misrach’s images, the viewers can readily imagine themselves jumping into the vastness of the oceans and the sands — fearing only that they would disturb the stillness of the photographs.

Richard Misrach
Untitled

For my own photograph, I use Misrach’s technique of taking pictures from a bird’s-eye view but I change the scenery from the oceanic landscape to a cityscape.

Chi Nguyen
Swing
2013