Friday, December 16, 2016

Friday Fun Facts #1

Winners of the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year Contest





















The winners of the 2016 National Geographic Nature Photographer of the Year contest have been selected from thousands of entries in four categories: action, landscape, animal portraits and environmental issues. Greg Lecoeur of Nice, France, is the grand-prize winner, winning a 10-day trip for two to the Galápagos Islands with National Geographic Expeditions and two 15-minute image portfolio reviews with National Geographic photo editors. Let’s take a look at all the winning photos, along with the honorable mentions.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Daily Photo #21

Robert Frank - "Parade, Hoboken, NJ, 1955" -  from "The Americans"

Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924) is an American photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider's view of American society. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said The Americans "changed the nature of photography, what it could say and how it could say it. [ . . . ] it remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the 20th century."[1]Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with manipulating photographs and photomontage.




Students do a daily "Bell Work" activity analyzing a significant or historical photo. They must make written comments about the composition, contrast, focus, balance, framing and statements each photo is making. This is our daily warm up exercise.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Daily Photo #20

Walker Evans

"Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The progenitor of
the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés  (1971.646.35), advertisements (1987.1100.59), simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making..."

Students do a daily "Bell Work" activity analyzing a significant or historical photo. They must make written comments about the composition, contrast, focus, balance, framing and statements each photo is making. This is our daily warm up exercise.

Friday, December 9, 2016

Daily Photo #19

Edward Henry Weston 


Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers…"[1] and "one of the masters of 20th century photography."[2] Over the course of his 40-year career Weston photographed an increasingly expansive set of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes, nudes, portraits, genre scenes and even whimsical parodies. It is said that he developed a "quintessentially American, and specially Californian, approach to modern photography"[3] because of his focus on the people and places of the American West. In 1937 Weston was the first photographer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, and over the next two years he produced nearly 1,400 negatives using his 8 × 10 view camera. Some of his most famous photographs were taken of the trees and rocks at Point Lobos, California, near where he lived for many years.
Weston was born in Chicago and moved to California when he was 21. He knew he wanted to be a photographer from an early age, and initially his work was typical of the soft focus pictorialism that was popular at the time. Within a few years, however, he abandoned that style and went on to be one of the foremost champions of highly detailed photographic images.
In 1947 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and he stopped photographing soon thereafter. He spent the remaining ten years of his life overseeing the printing of more than 1,000 of his most famous images.

Students do a daily "Bell Work" activity analyzing a significant or historical photo. They must make written comments about the composition, contrast, focus, balance, framing and statements each photo is making. This is our daily warm up exercise.


Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Daily Photo #18


Jacques Henri Lartigue

Arguably the youngest master photographer ever, Jacques-Henri-Lartigue took family photos that captured the ‘joie de la vie’ of an era. Jacques-Henri Lartigue was 8 years old when his father gave him his first camera. Little did he suspect that one day young Jacques' extraordinary photos would be displayed in museums and published in books. The photo on the right shows Jacques-Henri holding the big glass plate camera his father had just given him. With that camera, and many others to come, little Jacques produced an enormous photographic record of the joys and wonders of family life, an achievement any of today's grown-up photographers would be proud to have created.

But for decades his fantastic images remained sealed up in photo albums and scrapbooks meant as family keepsakes, not as photographic treasures to share with the world. That is, until Jacques-Henri was 69 years old, and his photographic genius was finally seen and recognized by the art world.


Students do a daily "Bell Work" activity analyzing a significant or historical photo. They must make written comments about the composition, contrast, focus, balance, framing and statements each photo is making. This is our daily warm up exercise.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Daily Photo #17


Robert Doisneau's Le baiser de l'hotel de ville (Kiss by the Hotel de)


Robert Doisneau was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism. Doisneau was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes.
Influenced by the work of André Kertész, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in more than twenty books he presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments.

"The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street." — Robert Doisneau

Doisneau's work gives unusual prominence and dignity to children's street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect.


Students do a daily "Bell Work" activity analyzing a significant or historical photo. They must make written comments about the composition, contrast, focus, balance, framing and statements each photo is making. This is our daily warm up exercise.