Artists I liked/found inspiring from the zoom:
Vivianne Sassen - Flamboya
This book includes over fifty recent photographs taken across Africa from Cape Town to Kenya to Zambia that disregard traditional boundaries of genres and tackle the problematic bond between photography, imperialism, and the colonial imagination. The way Sassen explores the figure in these images through a wide array of poses creates really beautiful shapes and I think this very playful way of expressing the body is a really interesting way to interact the subjects with the landscape around them.
Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs - The Great Unreal
I love how these two artists make very average, everyday scenes look supernatural and otherworldly. I think that this is mainly achieved through the composition of many of the images, with the bright grey sky taking up the top two thirds of many of them, and the editing in some of them to make the man central object look like its glowing. The work for this book was collected over a series of three years as Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs travelled across the US. The photographic work deals with reality and the fabrication of reality.
Sakaguchi Tomoyuki - Home
This book features photos from the suburbs of Tokyo at night. The lighting and saturation makes the houses look artificial like dolls houses, and I think this style could be really useful in my own work to explore my fairytale idea.
Dash Snow - Slime the Boogie
I really like the layout of this book, the scrapbook feel of it adds to the rawness of the images and makes the very hard hitting subject matter of the book - alcoholism and drugs - even more compelling. I think that I'd like to use a similar layout for my book as it makes it feel a lot more personal.
JH Engstrom - Trying to Dance
I love the haziness of these photos, enhance by the pale blue colour palette in some of them, the over exposure and they're slightly out of focus nature - it makes the images seem like a dream/distant memory, and gives the book a very nostalgic feel. This is something that I would like to achieve in my own book so could use similar techniques inspired by Engstrom.
Alec Soth - Sleeping by the Mississippi
some of the shots are very cinematograhpic. love the story telling in each image - showing how diverse the lives are that live along the Mississippi.
Leigh Ledare - Pretend You're Actually Alive
photos feel very plastic, cheap, tacky, almost as if the subjects are dolls - really successfully expresses the title of the book - the idea that some people just exist they don't live, they're part of the algorithm and just go along with the motions of life.
Nina Korhonen - Anna, Amerikan Mummu
giving some youth and life back to this old lady - changing perspective of ageing, can still be fun, bright (colour palette and lighting) and playful.
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