Mandatory: Read blog

http://vcuphtobook.blogspot.com/


Read and understand all that can be found on the blog. You are being graded on much of the material.

Quick Survey

If you are reading this blog, please leave a comment below (preferably your name). I just want to see how many people are actually reading.

Taryn Simon - For Pellegrini

Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. An exhibition of her most recent series of photographs, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2007. The exhibition will travel to the Museum für Modern Kunst, Frankfurt in September 2007. For this project, Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access. Her sometimes ethereal, sometimes foreboding compositions, shot with a large-format view camera whenever conditions allowed, vary as much as her subject matter, which ranges from radioactive capsules at a nuclear waste storage facility to a black bear in hibernation. Offering visions of the unseen, the photographs of An American Index capture the strange magic at the foundation of a national identity.



Simon's previous endeavors have been received with high acclaim. Her most influential work, The Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates photography's role in that process. Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Permanent collections include: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, CNN, BBC, Frontline, and NPR.


Interview

Mandatory Meetings

Please prepare now to attend these two lectures:

Alan Berliner 2pm on 3/27

TJ Demos 2pm on 4/2

Amy Elkins - For K. Parker

Amy Elkins is a photographer born in Venice Beach, rooted in New Orleans, currently living in Brooklyn with a wanderlust for everywhere. Work can be seen in Eyemazing Magazine- Feb 07 issue, Dear Dave- Spring 07 issue, American Photo- Jan/Feb issue, Visual Arts Journal-Spring 07 and at www.amyelkins.com.

Beate Gütschow

They could be a view into the future where modernistic architecture is a wrecked background with some extant [urban elements]. I wanted to create images which seem familiar to what we know from media, but at the same time it is impossible to recognize the place/site/country or time. – Beate Gütschow, 2005

Beate Gütschow’s panoramic landscapes are digital assemblages of details from the artist’s archive of images of trees, fields, knolls, clouds, people, and shadows. The interface between separate elements is invisible and seamless, however, the colors are eerily saturated and her use of light and shadow often contradictory. Consciously drawing on the history of landscape painting to create her tableaux, Gütschow’s photographs resemble the pastoral scenes painted by artists such as Claude Lorrain, John Constable, and Nicolas Poussin.

In an overlapping series, Gütschow continues to work by montaging multiple image files but the color landscapes have given way to a series of black and white urban settings. Mixing the architecture of many places, she brings together pictures from books and archives, as well as her own photographs from across Europe, Japan, and the United States (Los Angeles in particular). The human figures Gütschow includes in these works are either homeless people or tourists, as placeless as the constructed spaces they occupy. Where the lush pastorals of her earlier work reference idyllic painting, the new series employs view points and subject matter more suited to black-and-white documentary photography, rendering these post-apocalyptic scenes all the more stark and yet all the more familiar.

Gütschow studied at the School of Fine Arts, Hamburg and at the School of Fine Arts, Oslo, Norway. She has participated in one-person and group exhibitions at venues in Germany including Stadtische Galerie, Nordhorn; Produzentengalerie, Hamburg; Kunsthistotisches Institut, Bonn; and Bundeskunsthalle Bonn. Her work is in numerous collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been the recipient of numerous awards such as a Pixel Award, an Otto-Dix-Prize of New Media, and a Villa Aurora fellowship in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Berlin.

- edited by Kendra Greene

Individual Meetings / Class Updates/ Hido Lecture/ Critique Dates

2/25 Individual Meetings (The three of you missed last week's meeting.)

930 Shawm Chamberlin
1000 Amanda Meyer
1030 Jacquelyne Pierson

2/26

Laura Saunders 12
Kathryn Parker 1220
Adriana Pelligrini 1240
Berner 1
Cambell 120
Coleman 140
Devon Johnson 2


2/27 Class Updates

900 Allison Fiebert
945 Amy Montagna
1030 Maha Patel

2/28 Class Planning Meeting

Reports by Groups (more details in upcoming post)
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Todd Hido Lecture 3/4 at 2pm




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Critiques on 3/5, 3/6, 3/24, and 3/25

Present 2 completely finished prints at these class meetings for critical review. Even if your work is in a completely experimental phase, these prints should represent your best work .