Week 5

Chris Marker

Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat, Sans Soleil and AK, an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Many of his subjects were social commentaries reflecting on historical context. Mostly staged, he draws from portrait type painting to create a unique almost unclassifiable work.

Lewis Hine

I've always been drawn to Lewis Hine's work. This early 20th century photographer was very concerned with the social issue of the day including child labor. When he wasn't following the "breaker boys" in the coal mines his other passion was to record history of daring construction workers in New York.

Edward Curtis

I had almost forgotten about this photographer until Gretta and I were talking after class last week. The rich legacy of Edward Curtis is too great to try to sum up in a blog post except to say that his greatest concern was the disappearance of native cultures of North America. Though highly praised for his work, he also received some criticism for his portrayals of the Native American as not being able to adapt to western society which was not entirely true. By reinforcing the native identity as the noble savage and a tragic vanishing race, some believe Curtis detracted attention from the true plight of American natives at the time when he was witnessing their squalid conditions on reservations first-hand and their attempt to find their place in Western culture and adapt to their changing world.

My Progress:

I keep thinking about our last critique and something someone said keeps playing back in my mind. If a person sees my work and immediately dismisses it as 'religious' and moves on, all I have to say then is that's on them. I know we have a hard time breaking from our own prejudices, or a more politically correct term would be 'preferences', there's really nothing I can do about it. It is my work and if they can't respect me as a person long enough to see past the its initial connotation of the work, then there's really nothing I can do about it and apparently I didn't make the work for them. It's something I wanted to express and if they can't identify with it, so be it. That being said, I've been playing with transitions, and color and saturation to try to make it more cohesive and set a rhythm within the work. I think it's coming together nicely.