Intro to B&W Photography

by Shawn Ogden: Shadows

Click on image for more student projects.

Here’s a link to a Flickr group (LOMO) on alternative photography. Their range of images and techniques are very diverse, and inspiring:

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

from Architect’s Brother series

Continuing with our discussion on “what is an image?”… or what is a photographic image?

From photographer Abelardo Morell—same author of A Book of Books—a gallery of hauntingly beautiful pictures excerpted from his new book, Camera Obscura, where we discover how much of the world can fit through a pinhole.

Born in Madrid, Eugenio Recuenco is now one of the most important Spanish photographers on the international scene. Endowed with a brilliant sensibility for chiaroscuro, he is considered as a true heir of the grand masters of Spanish classical painting like Goya, El Greco and above all Zurbarán. He produces highly evocative scenes, and his photos reveal a mysterious world from which you cannot escape once you stared.

Besides the successful fashion or commercial photographs he signed for well-known brand, Recuenco has had numerous exhibitions in the main galleries in Spain: Circuit 8 (art and fashion), Tras el espejo (Spanish fashion) in Centro de Arte “Reina Sofía”, BAC (Barcelona Arte Contemporáneo) in CCCB of Barcelona, in ABC gallery from ARCO show where he won the first prize of photography, not to mention an exhibition in La Santa (experimental place for contemporary art) in Barcelona. He received for his work Concepción, Parto, Juego y Educación (Circuit, 2003) the ABC Prize of photography, while he was awarded the Lions d’or and de bronze in Cannes festival 2005 for his prints for Playstation. Eugenio Recuenco has recently directed a TV commercial for Nina Ricci. He also conceived the 2007 LAVAZZA calendar, just like Erwin Olaf and David LaChapelle did before him.

http://www.eugeniorecuenco.com/

Annie Leibovitz
Another favorite photographer, for her versatile, daring and crafty style. I was able to see her exhibition: A Photographer’s Life, and many of her original prints in Paris a couple of years ago.

I have one of her books (American Music) in my office in case you’d like to look at. Follow this link for some images from the series.

Now we start looking at more contemporary photographers. Dan Winters is one of my favorite commercial/editorial photographers. I had a chance to meet him while attending a workshop in Hunt, TX a few years ago. Really a great guy, and an excellent eye for “light composition.” He is now based in Austin.

Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people.” Her found street portraits besides documenting the social, are very intriguing, depicting people of various classes, and backgrounds. (click on image to see more of her works)

Richard Avedon
Born in New York on may 15, 1923 of russian-jewish immigrant parents. He attended Dewitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, but never completed an academic education. In 1940, at age 17, Avedon dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section, taking personnel identification photos. Later, he went on several missions to photograph shipwrecks. Upon his return in 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store. Initially, Avedon made his living primarily through work in advertising. As a staff photographer for Harper’s bazaar and later for Vogue, Avedon became well known for his stylistically innovative fashion work, often set in vivid and surprising locales.

“if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it’s as though I’ve neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up.” he said in 1970.

http://www.richardavedon.com/

Look at his portraits under: Archive