Tag: gelatin silver print

Andreas Fux

Photography by Andreas Fux

Born in East Berlin of the German Democratic Republic in 1964, Andreas Fux is a photographer whose body of work focuses on how the human individual evolves into his own artistic creation. He belongs to the Prenzlauerberg photo artist scene, which documented the last decade of the German Democratic Republic. 

Andreas Fux initially trained from 1980 to 1982 as an electrician. In 1983, he began his own sstudy of  the process and techniques of photographic work. During the years between 1983 and 1988, Fux exhibited his photographs in private gallery spaces. His first published works appeared in a 1988 issue of Das Magazin, a monthly East Berlin magazine that focused on culture and lifestyle. Working as a freelancer, Fux provided the publication with black and white photographs covering Berlin’s punk and youth culture.

 In 1989, Fux worked on photo productions for Deutsche Film-Aldiengesellschaff, the state-owned film studio of East Germany. Since 1990, he has been working as a freelance photographer for various newspapers and magazines, as well as executing his own photographic projects. In 1992, Fux’s first solo photographic book was published entitled “The Russians”; it was a supplement to his solo exhibition, of the same name, at the Janssen Gallery in Berlin, a show which later traveled to Hamburg and Munich. 

Andreas Fux gained a wider audience for his work with the 2005 series “The Sweet Skin”, which covered a decade of works between 1995 and 2005. For this series of portraits which focused on tattoos and skin scarification; he followed the lives of his models, with daily documentation and night shoots in his studio. Against a mostly white background and in the silence of the photo studio, nude photographs of his models were taken, in which the contrast between intimacy of the body and clinical sterility of the room was exaggerated. In another series entitled “At the End of the Night”, whose topic was body culture, the nude, and sexuality, Fux posed his subjects against a black background with a selective light source that modeled and fragmented the models sculpturally. 

Fux’s 2001 series “The Horizonte” is reminiscent in its formality of the 1980s “Seascapes” series done by Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, in which Sugimoto bifurcated the landscape images exactly in half by the horizon line. At the beginning of September 2001, Fux travelled across the North Sea on board a Ukrainian training sailboat. For this series, he celebrated the beauty of the horizon as an interaction between sea, clouds and light. The images of “The Horizonte” series were seen by the critics as an expression of calm and innocence. For his 2010 series “Kerberos and Chimaira”, Fux staged his motifs in a wind tunnel at Berlin-Adlershot. Using the strict compositions of expressionism and the aesthetic codes of the latex and fetish scene, his series examined  a dangerous and often not considered proximity between the erotic picture codes of fetishism and the aesthetics of National Socialism.

For his 2016 exhibition “Shame and Beauty”,  Andreas Fux opposed new portraits with a selection of older works, a combination which showed the development of his oeuvre over the years. His new work preserved the almost tender and respectful handling of his subjects found in his early works. The photographic sessions in which he bathed his models in soft light took an entire night, were meticulously planned, and took place in a highly sensitized atmosphere. This Berlin show contextualized the discussion on governmental and social repression and persecution; the works in this show had previously been exhibited by Fux in Moscow in September of 2015 under rather adverse conditions.

Andreas Fux has had solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including the Widmer and Theodoris Gallery in Zurich, the Photo Festival in New York, the Esther Woerdehoff Gallery in Paris and the Pasinger Fabrik Gallery in Munich.

A collection of Fux’s photo work from Berlin can be found at: https://andreas-fux.berlin

David Seidner

David seidner from of fleeting and lasting interest

David Seidner, Title Unknown, “Dancers” Series, 1993, Gelatin Silver Print

American photographer David Seidner was known for his portraits and fashion photography. He had his first cover photo published at the age of nineteen; and at the age of twenty-one he had the first of many solo exhibitions of his work in Paris. He was under contract for Yves Saint Laurent in the 1980s and his work included fashion shoots for the French and Italian editions of leading magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair among others.

Seidner’s immense cultural knowledge influenced his timeless images. His nudes evoked Greek classical sculpture; his mid-1990s portraits were inspired by John Singer Sargent, Boldini and Valazquez; his portraits of artists recalled classical busts of Roman emperors. In its evolution, his work became more simple and pure, ending in his “Orchid” series shot with an auto-focus camera and color negative film.

David Seidner’s portrait of Helena Carter was selected for the millennial exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as one of the 100 great photographs of the century and received the 1999 Alfred Eisenstaedt Photograph of the Year Award. He had over a dozen solo exhibitions and was in many group shows at the Whitney Museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris. David Seidner died of complications of AIDS on June 6, 1999.

Image reblogged with thanks to http://doctordee.tumblr.com

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin, “Cupid and Centaur in the Museum of Love, Maseillesr”, 1992, Vintage Toned Gelatin Silver Print, 30 ½ × 27 in, Private Collection

Joel-Peter Witkin has pursued his interest in spirituality and how it impacts the physical world. The artist creates surreal tableaux with which he seeks to dismantle our preconceived notions about sexuality and physical beauty. Finding desire within the repugnant and sacred within the profane, Witkin approaches these complex issues by working with the people most often cast aside by society in an unapologetic presentation of deformity.

Witkin begins each image by sketching his ideas on paper and perfecting every detail before he picks up his camera. Once the scene is photographed, he spends hours in the darkroom, scratching and piercing his negatives, transforming them into pictures that look made rather than taken. From their conception to their completion as ornate constructions, his references to traditional art historical iconography serve as a backdrop to his subjects and as a foundation for his ideas.

Reblogged with thanks to http://the-cinder-fields.tumblr.com

Minor White

 

Minor White, “Tom Murphy (San Francisco)”, 1948, Gelatin Silver Print from the Series “The temptation of Saint Anthony is Mirrors”

Minor Martin White was an photographer, theoretician, critic and educator. He combined an intense interest in how people viewed and understood photographs with a personal vision that was guided by a variety of spiritual and intellectual philosophies.

Starting in Oregon in 1937 and continuing until he died in 1976, Minor White made thousands of black-and-white and color photographs of landscapes, people and abstract subject matter, created with both technical mastery and a strong visual sense of light and shadow.

Minor White taught many classes, workshops and retreats on photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, California School of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in his own home. He lived much of his life as a closeted gay man, afraid to express himself publicly for fear of loss of his teaching jobs. Some of White’s most compelling images are figure studies of men whom he taught or with whom he had relationships.

Paul Strand

Paul Strand,, “Young Boy”, 1951, Gelatin Silver Print fromm the Series “Portfolio Three”, Detroit Institute of Arts

Paul Strand was born in New York in 1890. When he was 17 years old, he began taking photography courses, studying under famed photographer Lewis Hine. During his training, Strand also became acquainted with Alfred Stieglitz,  whose 291 Gallery in New York provided inspiration for Strand and other aspiring modernist photographers and artists.

A turning point in his career came in 1915 when Strand began to discover the intrinsic capabilities of the large-format camera, known as “straight photography.” His photographs moved from soft-focus scenes of modern New York that reflect the energy and movement of the city and its inhabitants to sharply focused expressions of objective reality. Strand’s images gain power from their integration of reality and abstraction within the composition.

n 1920 another shift occurred in Strand’s career. His social consciousness led him to explore the relationship between art and politics and to devote his career to progressive causes, turning to cinematography for a decade, from about 1920 to 1930.

In 1934 Strand helped found Frontier Films, a documentary film company dedicated to pro-labor causes. Strand remained an active photographer while working in film, but his subject matter changed. He concentrated on images of farmers and villagers in New England and Mexico, expressing nostalgia and admiration for a simpler life.