Thomas Ruff

Thomas Ruff is a contemporary German photographer.  He has done a lot of with with appropriating images, but before that in the 1980s, he made this body of work.  In the gallery all of the images are enormous, over 8 ft tall.  This work is less about the people in the photographs and is more about the method and structure of the project.  All of the images are on simple backgrounds with deadpan expressions.   They are all the same distance to the camera and have very similar light.  This creates a typology.  That simply means that it is a study of types.  In this case, a typology of Germans in the 1980s.  One other thing that I think is worth noting is that these images also reference ID pictures, passports or drivers licenses which is another kind of typology.  There is a great interview with him at the Journal of Contemporary Art website.  Click here or find it on the list of resources.  

Lecture: Dru Donovan Thursday Sept. 30th 11AM Ralls 202

Dru Donovan, a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, received her BFA from CCA in 2004 and her MFA from Yale in 2009. Her photographs aim to explore the way in which we care for ourselves and one another. Her first book, Lifting Water, part of TBW Books upcoming Subscription Series, looks at mourning by trying to reenact loss and see how photography can create a new perspective. 


Her work is some of the most interesting pictures with people I have seen in a long time.  This is a great chance to hear about her work and process. She also is teaching the Lighting/Large Format class, so she might be your teacher one day.  
Hope to see you there.

Emmet Gowin

"I was wandering about in the world looking for an interesting place to be, when I realized that where I was was already interesting."
-Emmet Gowin

Emmet Gowin is a photographer and professor at Princeton University.  After he finished graduate school at Rhode Island College of Design (RISD) he moved to Danville, VA.  He started photographing his wife, Edith and her family in the early 1970s.  His pictures explore the relationships in a family, the intimacy between he and Edith finding peace through a chaotic time in American history.  After this project, he started to explore the landscape and I will share some of those images with you later on in the semester.
More of his work can be found at the George Eastman House Emmet Gowin page.

The George Eastman House website (linked to the left) is a great resource for finding work by many notable photographers and finding a little more about them.

pictures with people

For the next week or so, I will be sharing some work that deals with photographing people.  This is by no means a complete list, just some work that has inspired me or that I think might be useful.

Richard Misrach Lecture at CCA, Tuesday Sept. 21 11AM

This is a golden opportunity to hear one of the Bay Area's premier photographers talk about his work.  This is only open to CCA students and staff so it will be a small group and it is a great chance to see some great work with peers.  The lecture will be in Ralls 202.  Hope to see you there.

Richard Misrach, born in 1949 in Los Angeles, is one of the most influential and prolific artists of his generation. In the 1970’s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing epic series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, the rigorous study of weather and time in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate, and On the Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation. Recent projects mark departures from his work to date. In one, experimenting with the latest digital technologies, Misrach has deftly switched positive and negative along the color spectrum to create images made without film.  In another project, “Destroy this Memory” (Aperture, 2010), he builds a narrative out of images of graffiti created during Hurricane Katrina, made with a 4-megapixel pocket camera.