Lars Tunbjork

Lars Tunbjork's series Home interests me as he seems to concentrate on colour and geometric shapes which i also tend to look at. This is especially evident in my images of Byker. I really like how Tunbjork documents these areas leaving them absent of any people it leaves a little to the imagination, you can almost imagine what the people that live here look like.

Made primarily in the suburbs of Stockholm (but also in Boras, Hedemora, Espevik, and other Swedish towns), Tunbjork's saturated color photographs immediately call to mind William Eggleston's images of suburban America. But upon a closer look, his style and method is far less 'democratic' than the American master. There is an homage to structure taking place within these pages that is decidedly quieter than the snapshot liveliness of Eggleston's world. For one thing, there are far fewer humans included within the frame, and while the attention to color and the quirkiness of suburbia is plentiful, likewise the absence of people adds to the slightly eerie stillness.
(http://www.photoeye.com/templates/ShowDetailsbyCat.cfm?Catalog=PK860)

In Home, from the late 1990s, the terser aesthetics refer to memories from Lars Tunbjörk’s own childhood. It is not a documentation of suburbia or middle-class taste, but a personal exploration of childhood surroundings and the buildings and areas we call home.

Commenting on his work, Tunbjörk says; “I want to be strictly documentary, but it’s all about me.”

(http://www.modernamuseet.se/v4/templates/template3.asp?lang=Eng&id=3529)

Nicholas Sinclair

AG The International Journal of Photographic Art and Practice

Winter 2007 Number 46

Trent Parke

I can't find any evidence to suggest that Trent Parke uses any digital postproduction, he shoots in film however it is easy to make this mistake. Alot of his images are quite dark and surreal especially from the series Minute to Midnight and Dream/Life.
His excellent use of light and shadow is so perfect and dramatic that it becomes quite unbelievable that there has been no editing.

Trent Parke

These are a mixutre of photos from Coming Soon and Welcome to Nowhere.

The colours are extremely vivid and dramatic. It amazes me that there is no postproduction here. Parke's use of light and shadow is impressive and something he considers in great detail.

This is a quote from Parke in an interview he did for The British Journal of Photography.

“I wanted to have this quietness, this stillness to the images. I’d have five spots in my day where I shoot from and I know that at say, 7 o’clock in the morning the light will be in a certain place and I can shoot there for ten minutes, then I move back to another spot where the light will be in a different place and I’ll shoot there. With this work, I’ll go back to a place again and again and again until something happens. I shoot a lot of pictures, up to 40 rolls a day. It costs me a fortune in film.”

(http://colinpantall2.blogspot.com/2008/01/trent-parke.html)

Andreas Gursky

I first came across Gursky's work in The British Journal of Photography and wanted to research into his work further. The manipulation of colour and form helps to create the perfect composition and this is what i love about Gursky's images. They remind me of the ski photographs i took in Bulgaria.

Andreas Gursky's photographic vision is extraordinarily precise. Teasing an eccentric geometry out of each of his subjects, Gursky reorders the world according to his own visual logic, accumulating myriad details to offer a sense of harmonic coherence. The artist's subject matter is late capitalist society and the systems of exchange which organize it. His pictures may be described as modern-day versions of classical history painting in that they reproduce the collective mythologies that fuel contemporary culture: travel and leisure (sporting events, clubs, airports, hotel interiors, art galleries), finance (stock exchanges, sites of commerce), material production (factories, production lines), and information (libraries, book pages, data). Yet despite the traditions he invokes both formally and conceptually, Gursky has no pretense to objectivity. He digitally manipulates his images—combining discrete views of the same subject, deleting extraneous details, enhancing colors—to create a kind of "assisted realism" as in Library (1999). For example the traders in Gursky's rendering of the Singapore stock exchange wear only red, yellow, or blue jackets.
(http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/past_exhibitions/moving_pictures/highlights_7b.html)

Martin Parr

I LOVE Martin Parr! Tourism is a major feature of his work and very much influences my work.

Small World

By the year 2000 tourism will be the biggest industry in the world. In this biting, very funny satire Martin Parr looks at tourism worldwide, exposing an increasingly homogeneous "global culture" where in the search for different cultures those same cultures are destroyed. Parr's larger-than-life troupe of tourists are ultimately bemused victims of consumerism, locked into the late twentieth century's insatiable craving for spectacle. These Small World citizens become symbols of the freedoms of Western prosperity; declaring their power and their right to travel, to choose and, above all, to consume.

(http://www.dewilewispublishing.com/PHOTOGRAPHY/Martin_Parr.html)











Tutta Roma

Tutta Roma stems from the Rome International Festival of Photography. For the 2006 edition, the city assigned British photographer Martin Parr the task of creating a comprehensive guide of the eternal city. His resulting portrait is that of a place filled not only with natives but, above all, with visitors, the latter contributing to Rome’s life with their enthusiasm and curiosity, their many languages and fashions, their colorful presence. With extended captions written by Ivana della Portella, a historian and member of the Municipality Council of Rome.

Beloved by Italians and outsiders alike, Rome has always inspired foreign artists and intellectuals. Following Henry James, Howard Hawks, and William Klein, Martin Parr shows us today’s tourists in today’s Rome, in its archeological sites, in its museums, and in its famous piazzas, as they struggle with maps and guides, as they consume pasta and wine. He takes on Rome with his unconventional and controversial trademark style, capturing the unique beauty of a city that owes much of its fascination to its swarms of devoted admirers.

(http://www.photoeye.com/templates/mshowdetailsbycat.cfm?catalog=ZC935)

Italy

Italy

• Food
• Wine
• Religion
• Fashion
• Art
• Romance
• Football
• History
• Architecture
• Tourism