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The next photographer I will be observing is Alessandra Sanguinetti. Sanguinetti is anAmerican photographer who is a member of Magnum photos.  She was born in New York in 1968 but was brought up in Argentina from for the majority of her childhood, however she is currently based in San Francisco.

She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a Hasselblad Foundation Grant. Her photographs are included in public and private collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her books include, “On the Sixth Day” (2006) “The Adventures of Guille and Belinada and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams”(2010)and “Le Gendarme sur la Colline”(2017) (Magnum Photos, 2018).

The reason I chose to research Alessandra Sanguinetti as part of my project is because a lot of her photography is based around travelling and storytelling, which is something is I will be incorporating into my project as a lot of my photos will be about travelling with my long distance family members.

This week we worked in groups to create a set of images that match the title “Art School”.

For this we photographed details of the Grand Parade building that matched the title from the brief.

Moises Saman is a Spanish-Peruvian photographer. As part of the Magnum Photos project ‘HOME’ he wanted to discover his home because he never spent much time there as he moved around a lot so this project meant he could rediscover his hometown. I can relate to Moises because my family relocated a lot during my childhood so I don’t have one specific place which I can call home. He quotes that being back in Peru makes him feel a connection as well as a disconnection at the same time because it is his home country but he has been away for so long.

It was during his last year in university that Moises first became interested in becoming a photographer, influenced by the work of a number of photojournalists that had been covering the wars in the Balkans. Some of his most famous pieces of work include his project about Iraq and the liberated places. These particular photos struck me because the civil war is always on the news but we don’t see much of what people’s lives are like and these images allow us to see a different perspective, one that we don’t always see. I believe it’s important to see what damage is being done so we can raise more awareness of the catastrophe. He quotes “I did not set out to become a ‘combat photographer’ when I started my career,” Saman said. “I suppose my work was influenced by the events of my generation, namely the 9/11 attacks and the global repercussions in its aftermath.”

Stefano Schirato is an Italian photographer who was born in Bologna in 1974, where he also graduated in Political Sciences. He has been working as a freelance photographer with a keen focus on social themes. Much of his works have appeared on Vanity Fair, Panorama, D La Repubblica delle Donne, Il Manifesto, International Herald Tribune, Le Figarò Magazine, Washington Post, Geo International. He covered a broad range of topics such as the condition children living in the sewers of streets in Bucharest, or the situation of the black ghettos of Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa. For this he was awarded with a scholarship to take part in a course with National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry.

The work which I am most interested in is his project called ‘Eye for an Eye’ which he went to Albania, one of Europe’s poorest countries and photographed people’s way of life in such poverty and how that differs from someone else’s life. The project follows the life of somebody called Edi. Edi’s story begins four years ago, when his father killed two neighbours in a fight for a dispute over severed power lines. Edi is 16 years old and from that bloody day he lives stuck in his house with his mother Rosa with the fear of vendetta. Edi isn’t alone. There are an estimated 2,800 Albanian families living in self-imposed isolation, trying to avoid becoming victims of blood vengeance. Despite the father has been killed by the family of enemies, Edi risks the second revenge because the neighbours killed were only two years old.

I really like how his photographs portray everyday life for these people and how their way of life is different because of their living conditions. I really like how he uses lighting as a way to depict everyday life and exactly what is happening in the moment as well as the political understand how it effects people.

One artist I will be looking at for my project is Mark Power. Mark Power is an English photographer based in Brighton. He is a member of Magnum Photos and Professor of Photography in The Faculty of Arts and Architecture and is even a professor at the University of Brighton.

Power happened to be there on November 9th in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. For many years his work has been seen in numerous galleries and museums across the world, and is in several important collections, both public and private, including the Arts Council of England, the British Council, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Marrakech Museum of Photography and Visual Art.

The reason I chose to look at Mark Powers is because he’s done a whole project based on home and family. I thought this project particularly resonates to my project about my mum and her sense of place because he took pictures of his daughter before she went to university in London and captured her emotions and how it affected everyone in the family. He did this because their family is so close-nit and his daughter was the first of his children to move away from home so obviously everyone is going to be upset. Powers mentioned that it’s hard when someone you’re close to moves away and I felt the same when my parents both moved to South America this year. Because of this I want to capture my mum’s emotions when she’s in Argentina as it will be a rollercoaster of emotions for everyone as it’s the first time in 2 years that she’s going to be there.

Another artist I will be looking at is Horiji Kubota. Kubota is a Japanese photographer who became a freelance photographer in 1965. His first assignment was for the UK newspaper The Times was to Jackson Pollock’s grave in East Hampton and in 1968, Kubota returned to live in Japan, where his work was recognised with a Publishing Culture Award from Kodansha in 1970. The following year he became a Magnum associate. He witnessed the fall of Saigon (Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam) in 1975, refocusing his attention on Asia. It took him several years to get permission to photograph in China because of their strict laws. Finally, between 1979 and 1984, he embarked on a 1,000-day tour, during which he made more than 200,000 photographs. The book and exhibit, China, appeared in 1985.

I specifically looked at his project on The Contradictions of Modern Japan, where he took photos his home country in 2002 and photographed how Japan is evolving. It is a well-known fact that Japan is a very fast developing country with high technology and a fast economic growth. His aim was to capture all this in his images. Of course in the early 2000s their technology was not the same as it is now but his photos show that even at the beginning of the 21st century they were ahead of everyone.

For my artist research I will be looking at Richard Billingham. Richard Billingham is an English photographer born on September 25^th, 1970. He is best known for his photo book Ray’s A Laugh which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese and heavily tattooed mother, Liz.

Billingham was born in Birmingham and studied as a painter at Bourneville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in a body of work later added to and published in the acclaimed book Ray’s A Laugh in 1996. Ray’s a Laugh is a portrayal of the poverty and deprivation which he grew up in. The photographs were taken on the cheapest film camera he could find that provided colours and bad focus which adds to the authenticity and the vintage look of the photos in the series. His father, Ray and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, with the alcoholic father drunk at home, and the mother, an obese chain smoker with an apparent fascination for nicknacks and jigsaw puzzles.

In 1997, Richard Billingham was featured in the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Art which included many of the Young British Artists. In that same year, he won the Citigroup Photography Prize. He was even shortlisted for the 2001 Turner Prize for his solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.

The reason I chose to look at Richard BIllingham was because although he did an entire photographic project based around his parents in their sense of place and made the ordinary seem interesting. This is known as banal. I like his examples of his parents sitting on the couch eating dinner because it is something my family occasionally does and i found a bit of humour through these images. i reminds me of my family and my sense of place because family time is important and as a family we eat together every night, however, Billingham’s images clearly portray that his parents can be very lazy and enjoy sitting in front of the television and eat their food.

Photo by Richard Billingham, 1995

In photography there are 3 different types of lighting:

• Directional
• Reflected
• Diffused

Directional lighting is light that goes from the lighting, your subject and the camera. Depending on the location of the lighting, the lighter or darker the subject will be. If the light is further away from the subject, the image is likely to be darker.

Reflected Lighting is when you have a reflector present which bounces off the presence of reflective materials in the frame. This means that the light being reflected from surrounding areas, such as walls or water or any objects that have a reflective quality, has a lighting impact on your image.

Diffused lighting is light that is non-directional, soft light where the intensity is even.This type of lighting is commonly used for outdoor portraits because it looks flattering on the subject. Because it i non-directional, the light comes from all directions and does not cast harsh shadows.

As part of my research I read a chapter of ‘Selecting the Subject” by Bill Jay. I learned a lot about photography in general and what makes a good photograph. The first thing I learned was that there is no such thing as composition. This shocked me at first because at A level our photography had to be all about how you composed your photo and you would get marked for having good composition but this reading taught me that actually there is no such thing because the author is not interested in the rules in photography and that what makes a good photo is creativity but good design is essential. I think the author is very honest in their opinion because they tell us that what we’ve learned in photography and what we already know is wrong and almost non-existent. However, he states that bad photographs are ‘disorganised, sloppy and lack clarity, whereas a good image is sharp, correctly exposed and clear’ (Jay,1997). This shows the difference in the types of photos and it is important to recognise the difference between them so that the next time we take photos we are aware of how we take them.

He says that “A good photographer is always striving for the perfect image, knowing that it is rarely, if ever, likely to be achieved” (Jay 1997). This suggests that if you really want a certain picture you must have determination and perseverance to achieve your goal, just like anything else, and if you try hard enough you will achieve that goal. I believe that is a very good quote to follow because it’s telling us to never give up and if we really want a good photo we will make it happen.

As an result, this has helped me choose my project idea by it allowing me to think more carefully about a subjectivity.

References:

Jay, B. Hurn, D. (1997). On being a Photographer: Selecting A Subject. Oregon: Lenswork publishing.