A Few Good Ones

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:41:51 +0000

Using photography as a medium is more diverse than it seems: some use it as a tool to capture a real or artificial moment, while others use photography as a tool to capture imagination and distant possibilities. The authenticity of photography is another layer of a medium; “photo illustrations” take from the photography genre (as a reproduction of a time.place.state) but with the exception of the rules of its developed or digital reality. Using a green screen to facilitate the bending of realities versus building actual giant sets bring radically varied effects to the image and the reality produced by the image.

While photography is generally enjoyable and artistically accessible (because we unconsciously admire and revel in the composition of aesthetic and the private interpretation of a storyline for each photo), amateur photography has grown into a part of our daily lives. From Facebook albums to profile pictures and even avatars, reproducing our personalities and experiences to share with others becomes much to do with personal image-control and self-branding. This social trend has given even the social bimbo-butterfly who isn’t familiar with resizing fonts a way to cleverly manipulate how they’re seen and how they identify; it’s also given the World of Warcrafts obsessed introvert a social outlet to comfortably express themselves.

But I digress;

The point is, that photography is usually thought of in the photojournalism-genre- sort of way; this is because in our increasingly aesthetic culture, we generally rely in pictures to tell us the news (or at least pique our interest) and the text to tell us more. Aside from magazine covers, photos are still assumed as showing the truth, following that sort of “innocent until proven guilty” thread. A different kind of artsy photography, where the images are clearly lying or bending the rules of our reality, is still a relatively under-enjoyed genre of art– the famous photographers tend to be the portraiture/ celebrity photographer, the Annie Leibovitzes and Herb Ritts of the world who started out as documenting the world and people around them (Leibovitz started out photograph for Rolling Stone magazine).

Anyway, here are A FEW GOOD ONES: photographers that take this road less traveled by, and instead dared to create and show a world that a mere camera lens is not able to capture.

Photographs from beautifuldecay.com, booooooooom.com, ivomayr.com

Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin

Dina Goldstein

Dina Goldstein

Dina Goldstein

Ivo Mayr

Ivo Mayr

Gracious

Hear/Say » amateur

A Few Good Ones