Though he has an old time feeling he still knows how to shoot his subjects very well. He has a great eye for composition and brings out the more dull colors found in the world now a days. I find it very interesting how he can take something that is very bland and make it into a beautiful photograph. He shows the beautiful light within everything.
Chris Donahue
Mikhael Subotzky was born in 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa, and is currently based in Johannesburg.
His most recent body of work, Beaufort West, has been published in book form by Chris Boot Publishers and was the subject of the 2008 exhibition New Photography: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Subotzky’s work has been exhibited widely in major galleries and museums, and his prints are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the South African National Gallery, Cape Town, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and FOAM (FotoMuseum Amsterdam).
Recent awards and grants include the Oskar Barnack Award, the Lou Stouman Award, the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Grant, the ICP Infinity Award (Young Photographer), the KLM Paul Huf Award, and the Special Jurors Award at the 2005 VIes Recontres Africaines de la Photographie in Bamako.
He works as a photojournalist. The history of documentary photography plays a decisive role in Mikhael Subotzky’s work. At an early age, the artist was exposed to the activist work of his uncle, Gideon Mendel, one of South Africa’s notable “struggle photographers,” and he grew up in a milieu of commitment to social democracy.
But the images he took of prisoners started out as his senior project at his university.
"One of the most controversial African-American artists working today, Renee Cox has used her own body, both nude and clothe, to celebrate black womanhood and criticize a society she often views as racist and sexist."
She was born on October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica, into an upper middle-class family, who later settled in Scarsdale, New York. Cox's first ambition was to become a filmmaker. "I was always interested in the visual," she said in one interview. "But I had a baby boomer reaction and was into the immediate gratification of photography as opposed to film, which is a more laborious project."
I love Renee Cox work. I think that her work is edgy and rude. She isn't afraid to confront and issue and doesn't shy around what she means. Formally her work is beautiful as well. Her compositions are always interesting, even with the figures in the center, the negative space around them becomes intriguing. I think my favorite series is the Yo Mamma series. These images show mothers as powerful women, and not as the purposeless nurturing mothers we see in so many renaissance paintings. Her images are nothing like those of Mary Cassat, she is bringing the image some justice. I like the Flipping the Script series for this same reason. I lover her take on classical images and how she updates them, adds race and gender issues.
http://www.reneecox.net/index.html
Brooklyn, New York
"strives to live in a world that is concurrently formal, anti-formal, unique, homogenous, and abrasively loud and silent"
He takes photographs of everyday events. I really enjoy his portrait series. They're not flashing. I feel as if they're very real and down to earth. The lighting in his portraits are very unique, and in very dramatic. There is a good amount of contrast in them, and some of the images have lighting coming through blinds and other objects so the light is hitting the subject unevenly. I really like that technique and the results. The people in the images have very serious expressions, which I like. The perspectives are somewhat awkward in some of him images, which is interesting. His series "not you" are all people in positions that they are not usually in, which make it relatively uncomfortable. His landscapes at the beach are very peaceful, and placed one next to the other seem to blend together.
Lisa Bove
Melanie Pullen was born in New York City on September 10, 1975. She is a modern photographer and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Pullen's work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Beverly Hills, White Wall Gallery, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles and Ace Gallery, Seoul Korea, Milan Italy and MiCamera. Her work has also been included in various museum exhibitions and has been broadly published.
Pullen began her early career by taking photos for several catalogues, album covers, magazines and so on. She worked closely with Beck in 2004 for his album Guero and The Information. In addition to Beck she shot many other musicians including Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Rock Kills Kid and The Black Keys.
Pullen is most noted for her series, High Fashion Crime Scene which consists of over one-hundred photographs based based on NYPD and LAPD crime scene files. Her work on High Fashion Crime Scenes (1995-2005) consisted of hundreds of models and crew members. Her photo shoots are highly staged and primarily represented movie sets.
Pullen's photographs are some of the largest images in the world. Her images range in size any where from four feet in length to ten feet in length. Some of her photographs are face-mounted prints and others large-format positives that are backlit in massive light-boxes.
Michael Mann
