Balthasar Burkhard:
Since 1997 Balthasar Burkhard (Switzerland, b. 1944) has been making aerial photographs. He photographs megacities such as Tokyo, Mexico City and Chicago - the proverbial "molochs" of modern civilisation. In addition he makes photographs of deserts: regions which, on the contrary, are not shaped by human activity. In this manner Burkhard sets cultural and natural structures over against each other, without seeking polarisation ( 两极化on purpose ) . Through their heavy, deep tones his photographs take on a comparable, massive stature ( 厚重的身材 ) . Yet in these almost sculptural bird's-eye views, details continue to command attention, right to the horizon. (from : photographor website and photograph gallery) works as below:
- From here, I just feel myself is shallow, it is shallow to just record vision. But i will take the silly camera for a while, 'cauz basiclly i think the photographors are simple and silly too----weiss
Thomas Ruff:
The guy treats photograph as art behavior more. Details see below:
- From him, i am thinking the fight between human and machine----the more we rely on machine, the weaker that ourself will be. Someday when our confidence merely bases on the accuracy and rationality, what a pity!----weiss
- What is photographor? the mass behavior of visualization seems nothing for me, 'cauz that does not mean we are more creative than 50 years ago. just playing with machine and being played by machine, but nothing. Machine does provide us more possibility of new world, but people, plz don't forget the derivation of your means - it is just for serving YOU----weiss
Andreas Gursky (thanks kenchikuka)
- his teacher, Bechers . German Photography - from the Bauhaus to the Bechers
Adopting a scientific approach to his art, Andreas Gursky - a student of the Bechers - examines humankind as a species that like any other can be known through a study of its habitats. Instead of focusing his attention on individuals and their personal space, Gursky creates colossal photographs of public spaces that reflect the collective culture.
The enormous volumetric area of a San Francisco hotel atrium seen through Gursky's lens reveals itself as an essentially meaningless grid of windows, dazzling lights, and the requisite "corporate" sculpture. Looking down onto the vast interior affords a bird's-eye view of a pretentious and ultimately mundane space.
Unlike in a medieval cathedral, where scale was a means of attaining a feeling of transcendence and a hint of the glory of God, here hugeness does not produce grandeur but merely grandiosity.
(from: http://www.mam.org/collections/photography_detail_gursky.htm)
"Both Gursky's father and grandfather were successful commercial photographers and Gursky often uses the bright colors and visual language of advertising, but he moved first in a different direction, studying at Düsseldorf's Kunstakademie under Bernd and Hilla Becher, minimalist photographers more interested in photography as impersonal, objective documentation than as a more expressive art form. Before long, though, Gursky turned to color (the Bechers work only in black and white) and expanded the range of his subject matter.
....Gursky is interested in crowds of people and he's photographed them in such diverse situations as stock exchanges, rock concerts, and ski slopes. In crowds, people lose their individuality and it is the pattern of the agglomerated whole that becomes the focus, both figuratively and metaphorically. The scale of Gursky's work enables him to capture that totality while retaining the images of the individuals of which it is made up.The artist, then, has moved some substantial distance from his minimalist black-and-white documentarian teachers. Other pictures, too, are digitally altered and the viewer cannot ever be sure which prints were and which were not. Gursky's freedom to play with photographic imagery should not, at this stage of the game, be an issue. He is, after all, an artist, not a journalist.
One imagines that the Bechers might disapprove of such technique. The Montparnasse apartment block was simply too large for one photo to capture; it is two exposures, digitally seamed into one--actually the first time that Gursky used digital intervention. He seems fascinated by the architecture that humans create and the subsequent place of humans within that architecture. The Bauhaus ideal of modern architecture has here resulted in a high density of residents; a beehive(蜂箱) analogy springs to mind. Again, from a distance, Gursky finds the stunning patterning of the buildings which has a beauty all its own; get close up and there are individual people and furniture and and lamps and plants clearly visible inside those windows. The same principle applies to Shanghai, a grand hotel interior, assembled from four negatives, with just a few people observed on the balconies.
Gursky also does landscape, with seemingly ironic reference to German Romanticism (Caspar David Friedrich) in Angler, which, nonetheless, continues the theme of the isolated individual, here within a lush landscape. Rhein II, a photograph of the river has no figures at all, but is a study in textures (footpath, grass banks, water, cloudy gray sky) in near perfect horizontal striations. In actuality, a factory on the far bank has been digitally removed. "(full version see: http://www.culturevulture.net/ArtandArch2/Gursky.htm)
Annie Leibovitz
- Interview 1 @Tapeta
- Interview 2 @Powells
- Gallery Women @the N.Y. TImes (w/ Susan Sontag)
- Articles @photography.about.com(there are more links on the bottom)
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