Week Thirteen: Jeff Whetstone

Timothy O' Sullivan 

Combining two vastly different elements of the world into one method and form of creation is an incredible skill to discover and achieve effectively. After attending Wednesday’s lecture given by photographer Jeff Whetstone, I have never been more impressed, infatuated, and bewilder, by one singular artist who was able to do just that. Whetstone has truly jumped boundaries and has created art through the means of another field of study. Jeff Whetstone, a native southerner, graduated in 1990 from Duke University was trained in the practice of zoology. 

The collection of pieces that Whetstone discussed in his lecture, allowed for a strong understand of the expansive variety of images that fall under the same category. Starting with a video piece tilted Drawing E. Obsoleta; he used sixteen-millimeter film that was pushed two hundred percent, which allowed for the removal of shadows to create an optical illusion effect throughout the piece, this video depicts the mountain ranges of North Carolina, with a black rat snake. The Tennessee born artist has combined his skills in zoology and ecology to create photos that highlight the wilderness in its newest definition that consists of the human presence. Gaining inspiration from nineteenth century photographers, including William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and the early works of photographer Roger Ballen, Jeff Whetstone has been able to establish himself as one of the most unique cotemporary photographers.

Whetstone showed several pieces from his collections, including Central Range, New Wilderness, and Post Pleistocene. By choosing these specific selections, Whetstone was able to clearly establish his genre, but also his immense skill in expanding on this topic in so many different formatted images. One in particular that I found incredibly impressive came from his work within the collection, Frame / Ablate. This video piece was made with the use of an electron microscope. Whetstone was simply asked to make art with an incredibly scientific tool, and that he did. Not only did he create a very appealing video piece, he also was able to combine his passion of nature. He used pieces of his own skin that created landscapes underneath the scope. Within one singular piece, Whetstone was able to successfully combine both his fields of study and passion, into one illuminating and unconventional art form.

Jeff Whetstone’s other compilations consisted of tremendous compositions of the integration of humans and nature. In a lecture that went for almost two hours, Whetstone said more about his unique art of photography that could have comprehended, however, after hearing him discuss the elements that made up his Cave collection and his distinguished portraits and landscape of an area that he s so familiar with, but many outsiders aren’t, he truly has to ability to capture a movement that was not planned or set up, but that surrounds us every single day. A significant quote that came from Whetstone’s lecture that I made sure to write in heavy, bolded letters is that the “formal elements are in need of being broken.” As a photographer, I couldn’t be more inclined to emphasize this statement as monumental.  In our environment, everything tends to be static. It is gradually changing, but tends to be viewed in the same way it has always been. With Whetstone, and photography as a whole, we genuinely as artist have the privilege and skill to break that norm and reveal and display the world in a form that not many have witnessed or interpreted in that way before.

Week Eleven: Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author"

Roland Barthes

In Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” written in 1968, the core idea being discussed is the impact of ones work. The author has to account for so many different elements that not only make up the piece, but also permit its growth and perception once it is released into the world. The final product of a piece of art is always considered to be a statement or expression of the one who is creating it. With this idea known, the viewer or reader of the author’s work must not only place him or herself in an unbiased, nonobjective standpoint of recognition, but also find himself or herself in the mind of the creator. Perhaps, this method permits a better form of understanding. However, in this essay, Barthes expresses and examines the multiple characteristics that can go into the appreciation and interpretation of a written work, which can truly translate into the comprehension of an artistic piece as well.

In the first few sentences of Barthes piece, he states that, “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the human person.” The ability to recognize and create self –expression is one that can prove to be quite difficult and only limited to certain individuals. I believe that the individuals that can so strongly do so, express an idea in a method of wide reception, falls under the category of an artist. The author is an artist. Instead of using paint, charcoal, pencil, metal, wood, or a camera, they use words. With this statement, Barthes is recognized that an author as a higher being. This is true in the sense that the author has to ability to influence it’s readers. The author has the skill of choosing specific and distinctive words that are put together to create pages and pages of text that depict stories, ideas, and feelings of the author themselves. I feel when examining an art piece, all these specific distinctions can be processed by the viewer, just as a reader does with a book.

Barthes continues to discuss the author’s purpose and intent throughout this essay. However, when he concludes his ideas, Barthes recognizes the true relation between author and reader. He closes the essay stating that, “Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.” Barthes closes his piece with this statement to identify that as much as the author as the ability to create a world within a piece of text that can not only connect with an audience, it also expresses the ideas of one singular self, the author. Barthes is acknowledging that even though that is a very powerful element to creation, it is truly the reader that gives the author his or her reason, and the piece as a whole its emphasis. This is true with viewing a piece of art. As much as the artists creates a piece that portrays a meaning that they believe needs to be distinguished, it is the viewer that not only matters in the process of understanding, but also in establishing ones own perception and a wider acknowledgement of the artists possible intent with the influence of ones own ideas.

Week Ten: Project Direction

After loosing my way with the direction of my concentration, I think I have finally come to purest explanation of my focus. The idea of chaotic consumerism is overly present in our daily and fortunate lives. When entering any vast space of people and goods, the want, desire, and need for these items is apparent in facial, body, and linguistic expressions. My goal is to capture the franticness that comes with the overwhelming amount of choices that are present in markets, stores, and towns. However, it is within the wide spaces, I want to maintain the human form. For if that figure isn’t there, I believe the importance of the overpowering consumer driven world will not be depicted clearly.

I have already collected a large amount of images that expand on this concept and focus of chaotic consumerism. Stretching from an Asian Market in White Plains to China Town in Manhattan, I have greatly explored the traditions of a specific culture that also blends and emphasizes the world of human and material. With shelves fully packed and the faces and silhouettes of the individuals that are not only the buyers but the worker as well, the full perspective of this specific scene can be depicted in a well-rounded form.

I believe that the use of a wider lens with each of these pieces has aided in creating this description of chaotic consumerism in the pictures I have been making. As I began to use this lens in China Town, not only was I able to capture the environment of a filled place of business, but the individuals that encompass it. The most recent image that I have taken that falls into the category of my concentration is an untitled piece that was taken during a mass at St. Peters Church in Manhattan while under construction. With the use of the wide-angle lens I was able to enclose the details of the church’s environment as well as the hundreds of individuals that sat side by side. Even though this composition is incredibly different from my other works and will be very different from my further pieces that fall under this focus, this piece makes an excellent addition to the collection due to it not only holding the silhouettes of so many unknown faces, but also how religion has always been and will remain as a consuming concept of our human lives.

As I scrolled through American Suburb X, I recognized an artist that has been the inspiration for the recent pieces I have been making. I have also discovered two new artists that have given me some inspiration and guidelines to follow in my capturing of the chaotic lives we live. Andreas Gurksy’s work, though all photoshopped to intensify its expansive and wide feel, has been my source for attempting to create a broader vantage point in my work. The leading lines he displays in his pieces are also characteristics that I look for to create additional description in my pictures. The other two artists collections that I came across come from Fred Herzog and Joel Meyerowitz. The images taken by these two photographers display a clear representation of what street photography should consist of. The unknowing or all knowing individual set in the daily setting of the hustle and bustle city life we reside in. The most inspirational component that I took away from these two artists mostly came from Herzog’s storefront connection. This is an idea that I would like to see if my direction of chaotic consumerism could follow. By viewing the individual either behind the glass or looking in, the outside and inside perceptive of the consumer world can be captured.

Week Nine: Personal Project Progress

Untitled Two 

After using the same camera for five years, the idea of changing the static features of my Nikon FG was not one I was overly willing to take on.  I honestly wasn’t aware that these settings could be altered and that they would bring more to my work. By changing the lens on my camera and exploring the mechanical deception that can occur from altering the ISO of the camera compared to the film it holds, has truly allowed me to perceive my work before releasing the shutter in a completely different manner.

Learning to push film was the most enlightening. As someone one who prefers to create an image containing a strong contrast between black and white, pushing film has allowed for me to add an additional characteristic to my signature work of taking photos of people. I noticed an increase in the amount of grain in the photos that I have been developing that were taken on four hundred ASA film, but pushed to eight hundred ASA. For me, by discovering this method of “fooling” the film, I have grown within the field of shooting inside a location, which I never used to do. I was quite biased in only shooting outside with natural light. I have expanded with using artificial light sources, especially with the change in ISO of the film, and the products have produced an even larger amount of detail.

Untitled Three

Switching the lens on my camera, was in all honestly, incredibly eye opening. After shooting my last four rolls in China Town and surrounding areas in Manhattan, I have never seen a clearer difference in camera perspective. I have used the same lens for the past five years on my 35mm camera, but after shooting two rolls right after another, and doing the switch for the third roll, I wasn’t aware on what a wide-angle lens would provide for one singular image. The images, Untitled Two, Untitled Three and Untitled Four, were all taken using a Nikon 24mm lens. The wide angle provided by this lens allowed for me too not only have my focus, a human subject, in the frame, but also provide a large amount of detail in the surrounding environment of that subject. This concept behind these images taken with my wide angel lens is the core concentration of my personal project. 

Untitled Four

After exploring the unfamiliar territory that comes with the Asian culture and the distinguished cosine that is sold in their markets, the stranger’s assignment has allowed for me to grow as a photographer. After only shooting portraits of individuals that I know and are not only comfortable around me, but I am also comfortable around, pulling away to photograph a stranger has given me an entirely new vantage point towards to individuals that I pass on an every day basis.

I felt that after expanding my photographic eye in the first Asian market that I went to, which can be seen in the image, Untitled One, I should continue with this common theme. Not to objectify this culture, but to understand and explore it from an outside perspective. While in China Town, with the use of the wide angle lens and going in and out of shops, butchers, and fish markets, I was able to take away images of the regular routine of this culture not only for the workers, but also the patrons.

Untitled One

I am not exactly sure where to go with my project. I am slightly stuck on making progress. I now have a large collection of images surrounding the Asian culture that are displayed in a very broad and spacious outlook. However, I feel if I go back to China Town I will just be taking the same, pre-existing images again. I could switch from this wide framing, containing a person, and attempt to get closer portraits with an additional lens I have, a Nikon 135mm. However, I was greatly enjoying straying from my norm and extending my singular viewpoint that is present within all my past photographic works. The image, Untitled Five, is what has me stuck. I am absolutely in love with this photo. To me it displays a wide angle of an environment, which is a key component to my concentration. However, it does not contain a subject. I wonder if I should continue down the path of the style that is being depicted in Untitled Five, or try to continue with exploring the Asian Culture that I am so foreign to me.

Untitled Five

Week Eight: Tod Papageorge - An Essay on Henri Cartier-Bresson

Tod Papageorge

After making such a bold statement in the opening line of his essay, Henri Cartier-Bresson: Two Lives, I agree with writer and photographer, Tod Papageorge. “I’m going to speak today about Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably one of the greatest photographer who’s ever lived.” As Papageorge begins his talk about photography at Yale, he leaves no room for argument, interpretation, and examination. With the photographs produced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Papageorge provides a powerful analysis that allows for him to make this daring assessment, that Cartier-Bresson’s work and him, as an artist, is truly, not just one of the best, but the best.

When we look at a black and white image, we try to examine it for the simple elements that make up the image. We look for a subject or object, and once we move past those steeples in the image, we begin to consider vantage point, shadows, highlights, framing, and positing. At the bottom of this list, comes to story that all these different components make up within the single structure. I believe this is exactly why Papageorge singles out Cartier-Bresson as being the most talented photographer our world of artists has ever seen. I came to this conclusion by viewing a few pieces of Papageorge's and immediately seeing the similarities between his work and Cartier-Bresson. These similarities that can be seen between these two distinguished collections of photographs, are in actuality, the basis for creating a successful picture, in general. Thus the presence of these themes in Papageorge's work and Cartier-Bresson proves that these qualities in composition make the most pleasing image to view.

In this essay Papageorge points out the technical’s that makeup Cartier-Bresson’s works, but he also acknowledges, the impact of the feelings and emotions that can be translated through his works as well. This also sparked Papageorge's, examination of what category of work and artistry that Cartier-Bresson truly falls under.  “On the heels of producing an unprecedented body of photographic poetry, Cartier-Bresson begins to inflect the deeply focused energy that had been required for what he had accomplished by cross-cutting it with extra-personal, political, and artistic concerns…this ardent photographer-poet assumed another identity.” Identity is crucial for not only an artist, but for that to be translated through the work. This ties into my understanding of Papageorge's utmost respect of Cartier-Bresson as an artist. The poetry and identity that Papageorge speaks of coincides greatly with all of the different pieces that make up a single photograph. It is the combination of those essentials that allow for the poetic interpretations to be perceived, and the identity of the photographer, which allows for a consistent theme within collections of work, to be recognized.

In both collection of works by Papageorge and Cartier-Bresson, the portrait is the most featured piece. Both of the artists focused on taking photos of the individuals that they have come across. Shooting post World War II, Cartier-Bresson captures the aura of each human he came in contact with. By traveling all over the world, Cartier-Bresson presents street photography as a wide range of images that not only show bodily and facial features, but also an environment that resonates as unfamiliar to a certain audience. By composing each one of these images the way he did, Cartier-Bresson proves to fall into this category of poetry and identity by creating a feeling of mystery within each one of these places that he photographed, but by doing so he proved the identity of each of his subjects. These being crucial components of his work, ties into not only allowing him to create a “free” identity and the artistic method of poetry as a comparison, but also allow him to define his work in these manners, as Papageorge interprets.

Week Seven: Garry Winogrand

After examining the works of the contemporary photographer David Hilliard, last week, I decided that this week I would view the works of Garry Winogrand By viewing such vastly different collections of work between these two artists, the ability tor recognize time within a photograph has become more abundant within my analysis of photography. With Winogrand's work, the essence of the 1950’s in black and white is clearly being depicted, but unlike other collections by other photographers from the same time period, Winogrand’s work has a much more lighthearted and joyous feel.

My fascination with photography as an art form comes from the specific style of street photography. I enjoy creating my own stage and setup and can also recognize when it is done incredibly well in professional shoots, but for me, nothing compares to taking a candid photography while walking around place that becomes so familiar day after day. I didn’t truly start to understand and appreciate street photography until I came across the incredibly large collection of photographs by Vivian Maier. Learning of her story and her anthology of undeveloped negatives, I was absolutely fascinated to experiences the essence of the 1950’s that was captured and then buried in storage. It’s this concept of capturing an era in time that not only does photography permit, but particular street photography. It allows for the citizens living at the time to display the features, the wardrobe, the expressions and the environment at one, natural concept, because at that time, it was natural for them. To me, there is something very special about the idea of being a witness through an image that was taken via the eye of another individual. Especially when it was taken almost seventy years previously.

With born New Yorker, Garry Winogrand’s compilation of photos that he took during the postwar decades all over the United States, we see something a little bit different with his street photography style then compared to Maier’s work. This clear depiction is what sparked interest in me of Winogrand’s work. It is not only seeing that one specific style can display so many different traits and characteristics, but also show, what I would almost say, two different sets of populations. It is clear that across the board American is surrounded by an incredible difference in socio-economic class, and to see that displayed in Winogrand’s work, emphasizes many ideas that are distinguished within his works.   

It is clear that with each one of Winogrand’s well framed shots, that he is harness the world of a certain group of individuals that at this time in history, weren’t expressing the struggles that one can come across in the complicated lives we lives. A great picture can be made, I believe, by featuring a strong human that is clearly depicting a powerful facial expression of true emotion. With these elements featured in one singular photograph, the viewer can be drawn closer in, in order to resonate with that feeling being depicted. This is usually done with images that show suffering, sadness, anger, or curiosity. I was immediately pulled into the photographic work of Winogrand because his images depict happiness, which is something that sometimes a viewer looks to and can also need to connect to when understanding a photographic piece of art.  

Week Six: David Hilliard

Between David Hilliard and Martin Parr, two photographers addressed during my critique in class on Wednesday, I chose to analyze Hilliard’s work more closely. As I view collections from both photographers, I concluded that it is Hilliard’s work that not only applies slightly more the work that I have created and intend to continue to create, over Parr's images, mostly due to the idea of space over content.

Parr’s work features the strong presence of people in their natural environments, dealing with everyday tasks within their career or daily lives. The images show perspective, but do not provide enough clarity or detail in portraying these individuals as the center of the pieces. Not only the people around them consume them, but also by the backdrop that doesn’t aid in providing a context that makes the subject all the more intriguing. I found myself becoming distracted by the other surrounding subjects, including other human presences and cropped sections of background environment.

As I clicked the tab next to Parr’s work, I was immediately consumed by the work of David Hilliard. Before I begin to break down Hilliard’s vast collection of pieces spread out over a numerous number of years, I would like to briefly acknowledge the “artist impact.” This is an idea that I would describe and emphasize as a crucial component to not only the distinguished eye of the viewer, but also the power, skills, talents, and abilities of the said artist, photographer. I believe it is beyond recognizable when a viewer can be so instantly drawn to one artists work over another. I viewed Parr’s work and in comparison to Hilliard’s, I did not feel the same attachment, interest, and over all feeling of beauty that I felt when I made my way through Hilliard’s website. Perhaps this is due to my personal preference, what I prove to be aesthetically pleasing, which can then relate to how to artist presents his or her work, or it can be a clear depiction of a single artistic component of decisions that creates an identifiable barrier between one photographers work next to another’s, especially when they seem to be focusing and representing the same form and shape of ideas.

With that being said, Hilliard’s work, I find to be the most well represented, well rounded, symbolization of the idea that not only I have decided to express as a concentration in my photographic work, but also in his. Expanding my interests in portrait photography, I have decided to concentrate not only on the subject of my photograph, but also the environment that surrounds them and allows the essence of the subject to grow and become well embodied. By not only making the artistic decision to create one image via a break down of separate images, ranging from two to five, Hilliard’s eye allows for him to see the whole in all of its parts. This is an idea that I find incredibly crucial to photography. One can never be sure how a viewer will perceive an interpret the work, they might just chose one singular section and have that be the focus of the work than then the piece in its entirety. With Hilliard’s method he is creating that process already for the viewer.

Many of Hilliard’s pieces, from 1993-2012, contain one singular or a multiple of different human forms, however, with these wide, almost panoramic vantage points, nothing is being over powered, where the focus of the piece would vanish. These images are visually beautiful as a whole, and when I find myself covering up the other section of the piece, I am not discouraged or turned off. It becomes its own piece of art that tells its own story. By slowly revealing the rest of the sections, the viewer has to ability to have their own story unfold. After viewing these astounding pieces, I have been inspired to expand my very close and clear focal point. This was something that I attempted and succeeded in doing within my Asian Market series; however, I have made a more concrete decision on how to expand with the ideas I have been exploring in my latest works. My goal is to keep the human form as the subject, but like Hilliard, I have recognized that the environment can enhance the perception of the individual and create a more diverse image that can evoke a more question filled analysis. By using a wider lenses and expanding my foreground of the human form to the background of the outside world, I can create a more insightful, thoughtful, and extensive image.

Week Five: Shore and Sante

It’s difficult to define a photograph. Clearly it is an image, a still shot, taken of something that is present in our daily lives. The image can contain strangers, friends, or even ones self. It can capture a moment, it can preserve history, or it can create a beautiful depiction of a singular subject. However, aside from these strong traits and characteristics, there is still so much more behind the definition and impression of the photographic image. In the Nature of the Photograph, an interview between Stephen Shore and Luc Sante, the two artists discuss the ideas that hide behind a single photograph and all the elements that can interpret and emphasize the photographer’s skills that truly create the artistic work.

In the first section of the interview, Shore takes note on some of the basics that make up the process of taking and developing a single photographic as a physical object. Shore breaks down the practice of photography in the essence that it can be considered a synthetic process like the creation of a painting, however in actuality it is truly an analytic procedure. A photograph does not consistently build off one core value; with an image presented in a photographic form it is an analytical representation because of the amount of precise thinking and anticipation of what attributes are needed to take the picture to create a clear and concrete composition, with proper framing seen not only through the view finder but via the mind of the photographer, but also to think so far ahead of how this image will look when it becomes the print, the physical object.

As the interview comes to a close, Shore expresses a key component of the art of photography when Sante and him begin to discuss the makeup of a photograph when they break it down to its simplest element, color. For me, the black and white image can never be replaced. It emphasizes the movement being captured in its purest form. You are given the ability to not be distracted by a range of colors. It also evokes one imagination. When viewing a black and white image, you can take it in for its grays, blacks and whites and how each one of those heavy handed colors creates a picture that can take away time and simply allow focus on the subject. However, after that examination of the image as a whole in a classic format you can begin to expand even further and place your own ideas into the image with its purest meaning, but also with what it would look like in your own mind. You can apply your own color scheme, then slowly the personality and sounds of the subject or people being featured. A black and white photograph, truly allows and exponential amount of growth in perception and interpretation that the photographer is providing for the viewer.

Shore makes the statement after referring to the distinct representation of “1970’s color,” and says that, “I believe that color carries cultural information – and that cultural information does date.” I agree with Shore with his analysis of color in photography. Color captures a time, just as black and white does. Color at certain points in time, for instance the 1960’s and 1970’s; clearly depict an era in a way that emphasizes the subjects that were representing that era. It provides almost a definition of what this time period was and did look like. Black and white has the power to not only provide and capture the purity of a more simplistic time period, before color was able to show a world that could only be seen through the eyes of the every day individual. But, the other component of a black and white image, no matter the time period, allows for a deeper and darker perception that creates a more personal and wider range of interpretation. A black and white image is pure, and when its presented on film, I believe it is truly the purest and truest most artistic representation of a photograph.

Digital photography as medium is also mentioned in this interview between Sante and Shore. As a photographer, I almost refuse to use a digital SLR camera. I find that whatever piece is produced within that medium is not a true depiction of the image that was being taken. It loses its core, its detail. For me an image on film, color or black and white, is much more beautiful and unique then an image that can be produced one hundred times over. Digital photography to me loses its originally and personality. I know I have to grow in the filed of photography, but when it comes to a negative, there is truly no more of a genuine, beautiful, photograph. To pull away from my bias of digital photograph compared the my film photography work, I used the discussions between Shore and Sante in the Nature of the Photograph to examine four of my black and white, 35mm, 400ASA, photos. The two portraits were taken last year and the wider images that contain one singular image with a wider perspective, that were taken last week, have truly proved to me that I have grown as a photographer and as an artists. I shoot people; my subjects will always be the human form. However, with this stranger’s assignment, I pulled myself back. I was able to continue with my love of the human form, the human facial expression and expand my vantage point. I realized that it is not the closeness of the singular human subject that can make or break a good photograph, if the surroundings, the environment that subject is in, are crucial to the representation of the subject, than they should be seen. The human and their environment can easily become one in a photograph, which I have realized, does not diminish the subject at all.

Week Four: Angela Strassheim

As I entered the darkness of the room that guest artist lecturer, Angela Strassheim, was halfway through giving, I wasn’t aware what style of images I was about to see. As I sat down in the last row, I looked up to see a color photograph, that I immediately assumed was done digitally, of a distressed mother in a car with her husband and three young boys. As she talked about the depth and meaning that this one singular photo had and its representation of the hardships that she has faced in previous relationships and a connection to her now currently being a mother, in just a few minutes, it was incredibly emphasized what a true artist was speaking in front of me.

Angela Strassheim was born in Bloomfield, Iowa. She currently lives in Connecticut and works in New York and Israel. Her college education in art began at the Minneapolis College of Art in Design. She then went on to receive a Forensic and Biomedical Photography certification from the Forensic Imaging Bureau in Miami, Florida. Strassheim finished up her higher education in the arts at Yale University and received an MFA in photography, after originally coming in with a focus in sculpture.

With a concrete background in not only the photographic arts, but also the experience of crime scene photography, Strassheim is truly a photographer like no other. As she talked about each photo the passion behind each image proves that she is a dedicated, hardworking, and precise photographer. A few minutes into the section of the lecture I was able to hear, Strassheim showed a self-portrait of herself. However, the image that was taken in front of mirror displayed Strassheim’s use of a four by five camera. This is where the connection to her color work took hold. Continuing to talk about so many distinct pieces within her vast portfolio, it became clear not only the skill required to use such a large format camera but also, Strassheim, as she progressed in showing more and more of her images, she would go into detail about positioning, lighting, choosing models, and even going so far as to recreate pre-existing images. These talents and dedication that Strassheim exhibits, to me, is what makes a truly talented and invested photographer.

As she continued with her lecture, Angela Strassheim made note that she wouldn’t have gotten to where she is now and have to ability to continue with her contemporary and progressive method of photography if it wasn’t for applying and receiving so many grants. She lists on her website and mentioned that she has been on the receiving end of the Lightside Individual Project Grant, the Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the Artist Initiative Grant. I think this is crucial for working artists to know about. By applying and receiving these grants, Strassheim was able to prove and prove again that her work needs to be seen and made, and these grants will most certainly allow that to happen.

Controversy as an artist is incredibly hard to escape. However, once one of your pieces is being scrutinized and subject to higher objection from the people and the government, you know you have done something remarkable that only a pure artist can do, you are making the viewer think. By making the viewer think, that means that this one singular piece evoked so much feeling, translation and meaning that the viewer has truly become invested in the piece, which I personally believe to be every artists goal. Strassheim’s lecture peaked when she began to discuss a photo of hers that was recently being displayed as an exhibition in MOCA Jacksonville. This photo was discussed in the article from the Huffington Post. The article is titled, “City Councilmen Deemed This Nude Pregnant Portrait 'Pornography,” written by Priscilla Frank from December. Strassheim’s simple, elegant photo of nude, pregnant women was considered to be pornography. The article expresses that by labeling this beautiful photographic art work as pornography, the world of art censorship is still overly abundant. The definition of art is being subjected with the designation of this piece as pornography and with this article and the prominence of the idea of a controversial piece within Strassheim’s collection, completely emphasizes that her work is crucial to viewing the human through all their apexes.

I am so happy that I didn’t view Angela’s work before sitting down and listening to her speak at this lecture. With every word she used to describe each one of her photographs, it gave the work its value. Learning about using her family as her subjects and the ties that her family has in the influence of her work, especially with her pieces from Israel that truly come from her husband and new found religious faith in Judaism, I felt more connected to each piece. With each well-constructed image, the color that comes from the four by five traditional photographic creates a feeling of connection and tradition, which after learning about the truths behind each piece, the feeling is genuine. I find this incredible. To successfully convey ones ideas, intent, and feelings within each photographic image of artistic expression, truly depicts an amazing artists that knows exactly what to compose to illicit and awaken that specific and distinct emotion, sentiment, and feeling.