Notebook

Created a series of studio images. For this project she stood in front of her model and did a ‘strip tease’. The participant had an automatic release cable and decided on when the photo would be taken. The idea was that they would take the photo of when they were most ‘turned on’. Its interesting when looking at the images that in only a few of them is Jemima near full nudity. In the majority of them she still has most of her clothing on.

Diane Arbus

SALT - Between the years of 2003 and 2010, Murray Fredericks made sixteen solo journeys to Lake Eyre in South Australia, a dry salt plane in the Australian Outback. Immersed in what he has described as 'pure space', Fredericks camped alone in the centre of the lake photographing a 'landscape without landscape' for up to five weeks at a time. The solitude, simplicity and repetition of the days, created an approach that was integral to the production of the images. I was talking to a friend of mine that was lucky enough to have a few conversations with Fredericks as well as sit in on one of his presentations. Fredericks was saying that he would ration himself to one page of the book he was reading per day. This was because he said he was so incredible bored and isolated out there by himself waiting for ages for the perfect shot. I feel that isolation is a huge part of this work. Shown in this image in particular by the contrast of the beautiful yet barren landscape and his single man tent and bicycle.  Fredericks used a bulky Japanese Toyo view camera loaded with large sheets of colour print film, this was ideal for capturing a wide range of hues, from the deep blue night skies to the more muted colours of the desert. The photographs were produced on a traditional 8 x 10 film plate camera and exhibited as large digital pigment prints on cotton rag. By shooting medium format Fredericks would have slowed himself down. In the sense that he’d be taking time to carefully compose the perfect image every time so as not to waste film. He could have easily shot digitally but I suppose he chose film intentionally for this very reason. I think it’s also interesting to point out that he rode there by himself with all of his gear and his incredibly heavy camera so these photographs also act as evidence for the struggle and endurance experienced by Fredericks on his trips. Having had to carry all the gear himself, he would have been restricted in how much film he could take; influencing how particular and precious he would be with each photo. Additionally, by shooting on such a large format, Fredericks was able to capture an immense amount of detail in the sublime landscape. Out of all the images in his series this one in particular caught my eye. The lower third is a blushing and beautiful red with lightning-like, rippling patterns thrown across its surface. This is in complete contrast to the silky, cloudy grey sky above it. Fredericks choice to use a long exposure has blurred the sky into a fluid, smooth, blanket that draws closer attention to the vibrant and detailed patterns of the ground. Of course, then there’s the tent and the bike, which seem fragile and small in the grand scheme of such a place, isolated within the landscape. By concentrating exclusively on space and colour Fredericks photographs reduce the landscape to its most basic level, allowing the light, colour and form to be the primary focus. However, it is the inclusion of the bike and tent that prevent the photograph from becoming an abstract, purely sublime image, and rather suggest the audience’s place within the landscape. 

Rick Steves

Check out her work here! Its amazing! http://vimeo.com/49209850

Anne Ferran taught Marcia Lockhart. Marcia Lockhart taught me. Now Anne Ferran's teaching me. Thats pretty rad.

For over twenty-five years, the Sydney-based artist Julie Rrap has sought to disclose and unravel the ways in which the human body has been defined throughout western history and culture. She does so with a seductive wit, an outward display of pleasure, and a determination to match the gaze of her audiences. Deeply based in the story of the body, Rrap’s art is always a surprise, resulting from an individual ingenuity that aligns with a feminist strategy to continuously seek and present the unpredictable and unanticipated. This exhibition surveys Rrap’s work over three decades and focuses on three key themes in her work: the trickster, the body double and the ways in which her work represents the body as a fragmented entity. Often playing the role of thief, vixen or mischievous impostor, Rrap has worked as a kind of ‘trickster’, literally ‘occupying’ the work of some of western art’s most famous paintings or pop-cultural images. During the 1980s, artists such as Edvard Munch provided vehicles for Rrap’s exploration of the ways in which the female nude had been represented through the history of art, as in her 1984 series Persona and Shadow. ‘The historical paintings’, she explains, ‘were really stepping-off points for me to do a performance’. By mobilising these well-known images, Rrap unravels the condition of woman as ‘other’ and this strategy has persisted in her work through to the A-R-MOUR series (2000). Throughout the 1990s until the present day, Rrap has used her own body in various postures through shadow play, masquerade, mirror and mime. She performs as a ‘body double’ for the still and moving camera. Drawing on the notion that gender is in itself a performance, Rrap has forged the theme of the stand-in, a prosthetic body double, and her works often invite viewers to imagine themselves in such a role. This is evident in sculptural installations such as Vital Statistics (1997) and Hard Core/Soft Core (2006) through to the most recent work in this exhibition, Body Double (2007). Increasingly, Rrap represents a body in pieces, inevitably raising ethical and aesthetic issues inrelation to how we depict, interpret and understand the human form. Such issues have been discussed both in broad social terms (for example in relation to the Abu Ghraib photographs or in connection with genetic engineering), as well as in the field of art. For Rrap, the body and its representation is porous, excessive and oozing with a sense of tease and trickery. In works such as Hairline Crack (1992), Porous Bodies (1999) and Overstepping (2001), this body oversteps the margins of comfort, taking us into the zone of transgression. It is, however, always in the company of a foil that more often than not, allows us to laugh out loud with the artist.

In A Woman Runs and Idea of the Sphere Fahd has worked with constructed images, setting up scenes to photograph them. Sometimes these have been mythical and mysterious such as the women running through a forest towards the camera. Sometimes they have been full of delicate whimsy such as in works like Eclipse of Another, where black and white balloons vie for attention against a bright blue sky.

The series Untitled Film Stills, 1977–1980, with which Cindy Sherman achieved international recognition, consists of 69 black-and-white photographs. The artist poses in different roles and settings (streets, yards, pools, beaches, and interiors), producing a result reminiscent of stills typical of Italian neorealism or American film noir of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. She avoided putting titles on the images to preserve their ambiguity. Modest in scale compared to Sherman’s later cibachrome photographs, they are all 8 1/2 by 11 inches, each displayed in identical, simple black frames. Sherman used her own possessions as props, or sometimes borrowed, as in Untitled Film Still #11 in which the doggy pillow belongs to a friend. The shots were also largely taken in her own apartment.

Tina Barney

Tina Barney is best known for her ongoing documentation of the lifestyles and relationships of her family and close friends, many of whom belong to the social elite of New York and New England. Barney’s style is part candid, part tableau; her subject matter raises in equal measure issues of privilege and the interaction of family members. While striving for the candidness of a snapshot, Barney became one of the first artists working in the 1980s to explore a “directorial” mode of making pictures. Her decision to direct her subjects stems in part from her choice to sacrifice the nimble freedom of a 35 millimeter camera (with which she began her photographic career) for the large format camera’s ability to deliver a more detailed rendering of the trappings of wealth so integral to depicting her subjects and their environment. Her direction ranges from posing her subjects to simply asking them to repeat a spontaneous gesture, and her style of working often includes careful lighting and the help of an assistant. The effect is an unexpectedly intimate access to her subjects.

After recently exhibiting her first solo show, Entertain Me (2011), Katherine is currently working on a new body of work for her next solo exhibition in December.

In the first image of the series Something More #1 Moffatt appears in the centre of frame in an Asian dress set against a hut in which a woman in a white dress leans against the door. Two children look on and a man in a coolie hat is seen in the background. The backdrop is painted and the image has the look of a film set. Moffatt's image seeks to confuse and disturb meanings of cultural identification while questioning the authenticity of the presentation by reinforcing its own 'fake' construction. The subsequent images in the series present variations on these ideas.

LEIBOVITS Annie

Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”

Craig Fritz began his career as a photojournalist at the Santa Fe New Mexican and was most recently a staff photographer at The Albuquerque Tribune, a newspaper consistently recognized as a leading photographic publication.  He was a finalist in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation Journalism Awards and the Alexia Foundation for World Peace.  He has been honored by the Pictures of the Year International, was a 2004 National Press Photographers Association regional photographer of the year, and was the 2005 recipient of the Willard Van Dyke Memorial Grant in Photography. You may see Craig's editorial work at www.craigfritz.com.

Through the means of photography, I explore the use of human presence within the landscape to construct scenes. Whether the human presence is physical or implied, it plays a leading role in dictating the impact of the image on the viewer. I like to use the human element to construct narratives and scenes; this aspect of the images is what provokes thought and emotion. I identify my photographs as visual representations of ideas and visions that come from my head. When I create them I like to have control over everything-the environment is my “stage” and the figures are my “performers.” I aim to create images that are ambiguous and compelling-a space for contemplation.