Week 15

My first photographer for the week is Anna Orlowska who's website can be found here. Her work frequently shows a cinematic quality that remind me of Gregory Crewdson who I am a huge fan of. It frequently shows some sort of narrative but an incomplete one that requires the viewer to fill in bits and pieces changing the story from person to person. While the story changes series to series Orlowska manages to keep a signature to her work. Color. Orlowska uses color that would never occur outside of a photograph and again like Crewdson feels like a movie still. While the images I choose for this blog may not represent that I found them the most appealing to me. Her images also have a great deal of visual texture. They feel real adding to the surreal and movie like quality of her work. 

My next photographer is Margo Ovcharenko who's website can be found here. These specific images are from her series "Hermitage". Ovcharenko chooses to not look for aesthetic beauty in her work but simply a way to distort time and space. She also chooses to focus on people who are between the ages of being a true adult and a teenager. Ovcharenko also states that her main style is to portray these people like pre-19th century paintings without posing them. What I found most interesting about Ovcharenko's work was that while her work avoids aesthetic beauty she choose to photograph the age group that is known as the beauty ideal. This to me seems odd. However she has stated that these people are her friends and so to her photographing them is important. She chooses to allow them to stare off into their own thoughts as if hermits in their own heads. While her images may be extremely simple or complex Ovcharenko achieves interesting images that say more about her than her subjects.

My final photographer for the week is Andrea Star Reese who's website can be found here. These images are from her project "The Urban Cave". This project documents those people who live in New York City's train tunnels. Reese goes out of her way to document them in with respect and dignity on both their worst and best days. She spent months getting them to trust her in order to have access to this other world. While the series is about those who make their homes in these tunnels she goes out of her way to keep the work about their relationships rather than how they survive. It is about showing their lives rather than survival. I could go on and on about visual texture or detail or light but honestly what attracts me to the images is the subject and Reese's efforts. Sometimes that for me is more than enough.