Photography
"There's more than what meets the eye"
"Some people are old at 10 and some are young at 90... time is a concept that humans created" - Yoko Ono
"Art is what you can get away with".
Altered photos:
Inspirational Photographer: Bruce Davidson
"We took a walk for a few minutes together. The street became his photographs". - Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson is a famous American commercial photographer. Bruce Davidson was born on September 5th 1933 in Oak Park, Illinois, where he also began taking photographs at the young age of ten years old. While continuing his passion throughout his life, he continued to do what he loved while attending Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University. Later in his life he was drafted into the army was then stationed in beautiful Paris, France. After Bruce Davidson left the service in 1957, Davidson worked as a freelance photographer for LIFE magazine and in 1958 became a full member of Magnum photos. Bruce Davidson was most notable for The Dwarf, Brooklyn Gang and Freedom Rides. He was also famous for photography in Harlem, NY. Throughout his life Davidson received Guggenheim fellowship, received a grant for photography from the National Endowment for the Arts where he spend 2 years witnessing the dire social conditions on one block in East Harlem, NY.
The photograph on the right, is one of Bruce Davidson series of Brooklyn Gang.
This photo is most appealing to me because, In Brown V. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public education facilities for blacks and whites at the state level. Whereas in 1964, The Civil Rights Act ended all state and local laws requiring segregation. This photo was taken in 1959, just a few short years before segregation was stopped. You could tell that people where just adjusting to what they knew was going to happening. This photograph show two black citizens and three black citizens all sitting together in one seat in the back of the bus. The five members at the back of the bus, looks as though they had a long day at work and they are just trying to get back home. I love how Bruce Davidson captured it more of in the moment, where the people are told how to look and it doesn’t appear to be staged or modeled. Bruce Davidson seemed to use a large depth of field where everything is in focus. For the shutter speed it seemed as he focused more on a stop action approach and fixed his shutter speed to 60, which is a hand held speed. Overall, I just loved how he captured the realism and everything just seems to be in the moment. I think this photograph shows the everyday living around the year of 1959.
Bruce Davidson
The Brooklyn gang: 59 of 107
"The Most colorful thing in the world is black and white, it contains all colors and at the same Time excludes all".
Alysia Beth McGuire
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What am I Doing? Trying to capture what most people take for granted or often overlook.
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How am I doing it? To examine my environment and how could I capture this particular piece and make it either more abstract, detailed, emphasizing on the beauty in this piece, or draw the viewers attention to the foreground that is often overlooked.
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Why am I doing it? People often do not look around themselves and observe the beauty that is surround by them. It can be the beauty of nature to buildings to plants to even people.
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What influences me the most? What influences me the most when I capture my photographs to focus on the realism. I think I influence myself the most because I always wanted to work with photography. Being able to take this Photography I class helped me live out what I always wanted to do which was, to capture beauty and work in the dark room and see my photographs come to life.
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How does my art relate to the art of my contemporaries? My art can relate to the art of my contemporaries because we tend to focus on capturing what other wouldn’t think of capturing. I think you would have to have a different mindset because what we think is beautiful, or important to us to capture.
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What do I want other people to understand about my art? While looking at my art, even though my photographs is obvious of what I took a picture of, I want them to try to create a story with each photograph because there is no set story behind each photograph. My photographs are supposed to open the mind of viewers to try to put a reason to why I capture this particular photograph.