Marina Ballo Charmet’s work focuses on the spatial
landscapes. Her images put you into a space and make you feel as if your eyes
were the lens. Her images in the book “The Park” focus on people going about
life in a park setting. Her photos are made by showcasing a scene in which you
may or may not know all of what is going on. She tends to keep her camera close
to the ground as to have a lot of grass at the bottom of the frame. Along with
this, she uses a large aperture in order have a short depth of field so she can
focus only on her intended subject. All of her photos are in a landscape
orientation allowing the viewer to see the image as if it were them behind the
camera. Her images are just simple park landscapes that almost always include
people involved in some sort of activity. Her images are different from anyone else’s
because of their ambiguity. There are times when people’s heads aren’t in the
frame or their faces aren’t in the area of focus. This detaches the viewer from
focusing on the people themselves and allows the viewer to focus on the image
as a whole.
Andrew Cross’s work is solely focused on life along American
highways in the book “Along Some American Highways”. His photographs give an
interesting perspective on something people see on a daily basis. He turns
highways, truck stops and gas stations into places that are nearly barren. His
photos very rarely include cars which is very unlikely for places that are
built for vehicles. His photos are all taken in a landscape orientation. This allows
the viewer to see the image like they would if they were to visit these
highways. He uses a rather small aperture because everything in the frame seems
to be in focus. Leading lines are a big part of all of his photos. At the bottom
of nearly every one, there is a horizontal line that leads your eye across the
photo. This is because at the base of almost every photo is a road. This allows
any vertical lines to be a contrasting element that adds dimension to the
photo. I would describe these by saying if you were walking along a barren
highway, this is what you would see. These images are different than your
standard photo of a highway because the set of them is so unique. The average
photo of a highway has cars on it. His photos are so calm and still because of
the lack of vehicles.
Barbara Astman’s photos in the book “Barbara Astman:
Personal/Persona A 20-Year Survey” spans a large amount of her career. In her
early work, she focused on black and white film images of women. Slowly her
work included men and then couples. Then, her work turned into taking a series
of images to portray a narrative. These were done by taking 6 polaroid images
and a corresponding sentence. Then, her work turned into self-portraits. This
series was made up of very similar images. They all had Barbara positioned so
that the frame included everything below her eyes and above her knees. This allowed
the viewer to view the subject as a subject and not the creator of the images.
She basically wanted to detach herself from the images and did so by not
including one of the most recognizable features on a person. Overlaying all of
these photos was a letter to a friend that she had written. This then
transformed into her Red Series where the form of the photograph and model was
identical but the content was different. It simply was a woman with red lips
holding red objects against a black background with red objects on it. Her work
developed over time to create a body of work that clearly showed her
progression. These images are different because they contain the artist that
created them while also preserving her identity.
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