"The Nature of Photographs"

"The Nature of Photographs" is a book where the main question is: how to look and understand a photograph? The book was written by the photographer Stephen Shore in the 90's. According to Stephen Shore, a photograph can be viewed in several levels: the physical level, the depictive level and the mental level. On the first level, physical level, a photograph is a print. Is at this level that the viewer will read the photograph and try to understand it, the context that the viewer sees the photograph will affect the meaning that he will make of it. The depictive level, second one, is where the world is captured changing in four different ways: flatness, frame, time and focus. These four different ways will define the photograph depictive content and structure. The final level, metal level, is the viewers interpretation of an image, is where we construct mental images according to the light.

 “The artist starts with a blank page and must fill it. The photographer starts with the clutter of the world and must simplify it.” – Stephen Shore

Source:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Nature-of-Photographs/Stephen-Shore/e/9780801857201

http://www.phaidon.co.uk/store/photography/the-nature-of-photographs-by-stephen-shore-9780714845852/

"The Nature of Photographs" by Stephen Shore

Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is an american photographer that had for many years the drugs and alcohol as a toll for her work. Her first exhibition was in 1973 and was based on her photographic journeys among the gay and transsexual communities. Her work is focus on the extended family consisting of friends and lovers - the people who surround her, sharing the same pleasures and pains. It is the razor's edge: a clandestine world of hard lives, drug abuse, love, sex, death, violence and omnipresence of death. Goldin's photographs are not deliberate, but rather like snapshots from a family album and it is this realism and unpretentious style that makes her photographic journal a faithful record of her life. Nan Goldin made a series of self-portraits showing her experiences at the clinic that she was at the time (1988). 

 "My work changes as I change. I feel an artist's work has to change, otherwise you become a replication of yourself." - Nan Goldin

Source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/may/22/photography.art

http://www.brain-juice.com/cgi-bin/show_bio.cgi?p_id=88

"The Hasselblad Award 2007 - Nan Goldin"

"Ray's a Laugh"

"Ray’s a Laugh” is a chronicle of an undeserved life, of non achieved dreams, a type of story lived for so many others. It is probably the best-known work of the photographer Richard Billingham that nowadays dedicates his work mainly to landscapes.  Are the landscapes some sort of exit for the land of alcohol-living, the land of smoke? Well probably Richard Billingham was able to found there the calm, the tranquillity, the peace that he wasn't able to find on his own home but we can not forget that in “Ray’s a Laugh” we can find moments of love and happiness. It seems quite easy to take photographs of our family, capture the emotions, but when confronted with that, it is actually really hard. How can be easy to capture through the lens the problems of our family, of our friends and put it into a book to the world to see? The best people to answer to that question are probably Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham and even Kent Klich in his work "The Book of Beth”. The main question is probably how can something so tragic and sad be so beautiful and so aesthetical magnificent at the same time? This book is able to drop us in a feeling of happiness and in the following moment in a feeling of despair.

Source:

http://5b4.blogspot.com/2009/01/book-of-beth-and-picture-imperfect-by.html

http://www.kentklich.com/case.php?case_id=25

http://fototapeta.art.pl/2003/ngie.php

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?id=1108&type=book&cn=14

http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/165167343.html