Nicole Abbett

This week I wanted to share a couple more photographers whom I admire. I love black and white photography, but have been pushing myself to do more color photography and these artists have created some extremely amazing color images. The first is Stephen Shore who is widely known for taking photos of mundane, everyday things. He is also known for the photos he takes of his meals. When I am out to dinner at a restaurant, at a friend’s house, or on vacation I find myself taking snapshots of my meals. My recent favorite was at Panini Pete’s in Fairhope, Alabama. I wish I could hop in my car and go there now! I did not find a dedicated website for Stephen Shore, but his work can be found by Googling his name or on Wikipedia.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the work of Julie Blackmon. She photographs everyday happenings with much more of a twist. While I love her black and white work, I fall in love with her color images every time I look at them. Blackmon’s Domestic Vacation series is a hoot! Check her out at www.julieblackmon.com.

Birds at Home

Gum

I attended a great artist lecture last night at USF and heard a talk by Siebren Versteeg. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is here for the semester working on a community arts project in the Sulfur Springs area, a project for Graphic Studio, and several other projects. I was really interested in the interactive pieces he created with a never repeating stream of images. One was called Triptych which consisted of three LCD screens that were hooked up to a computer continually searching for triptych images. Then there was New York Windows which is a piece that is always regenerating itself. The viewer is able to interact and search around the piece by use of a touch screen as it is constantly regenerating itself. Versteeg enjoyed the chaos in the streets of NY when he first moved there and this piece was created to keep the chaos alive.

Another great piece was CC2003. Versteeg took short loops of newscasters that had a closed captioned-like type beneath them to make it appear as if they are saying things like ‘Okay, here is where I get all cool’ and ‘I guess I have a lot to say.’ He was able to do this by having an inter net connected computer program that had an output to a wall mounted television. The TV displayed the newscaster loops with the real time diary feeds on the bottom which resulted in a closed caption looking television screen. There are video installations of them on his website.

Check him out! He had a great sense of humor and I would definitely go hear him talk again!

www.siebrenversteeg.com

I watched a great documentary on Sally Mann the other day called What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. Mann is followed around as she embarks on a new project and continues older ones. It touches on the controversy that arose in the work that she is best known for, Immediate Family, in which her three young children were her subjects. The film highlights her life as an artist and the challenges she still has to face. Two thumbs up!

On Saturday I watched another documentary showcasing the life and works of Georgia O’Keeffe (it was simply called Georgia O’Keeffe). The film shows the working relationship between artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, how it leads to love, then reveals their complicated relationship and how it effects her life. When the film starts off O’Keeffe is already an artist and I would have liked to know more about what originally led her to her work. The film also fails to mention that the 21-year-old that comes into their lives (the woman Stieglitz has an affair with) was married with a new baby. Keys points are missing that would have offered a better understanding of their lives and a better movie.

After editing all of my images for my triptych project, I learned something very important. In my editing process I discovered that when I shot my photographs, I overlapped the photos just a little too much, which caused them to not line up how I originally envisioned. *sigh* Everything went as planned except for this little snafu. It resulted in a lot of extra work, but I was eventually able to line up the images how I wanted. I will definitely approach this differently next time. I am, however, elated to know that this was the only problem I encountered. Overall, this project was a tons of fun and I plan on creating more triptychs in the future!

I love me some Kanye West, but what an ass!!!
Kanye ruined sweet little Taylor Swift’s big moment during her VMA acceptance speech when he obnoxiously went on stage and took the microphone from her stating that “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” At least the crowd booed him.
Check out this article for the full details…
http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/hiphopmediatraining/171413/kanye-west-has-truly-lost-it-this-time/http://

“The Drummer”

“Hopper”

“Untitled (arc)”

“Untitled (ocean)”

“Untitled (Moskva)”

“Untitled (divide)”

A few photos I took of my husband in honor of those who have served our country, those who currently do, and those who will.

Listed bellow are a list of artists who specialize in diptychs, triptychs, and grids. I was provided with them in class for influence and ideas for the current project I am working on. Looking at the work of these artists helped me formulate the ideas for my current project and have also inspired me for future projects. For this project I decided to document people, through the use of triptychs, focusing on one specific detail others may not know about them at first glance. Some of the influences I found for this project came from the artists listed below and some from artist Gillian Wearing. In Wearing’s In the Making series she had her subjects ‘communicate’ through a written statement on a piece of paper and then documented them through photographs. A lot of her work involves discovering honest or unknown details of people. We often judge people at first glance without knowing anything about them. If they are presented in another way maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to judge…