William Eggleston

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi.

Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's, First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966. color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties. “The dye-transfer process resulted in some of Eggleston's most striking and famous work, such as his 1973 photograph entitled The Red Ceiling, of which Eggleston said, "The Red Ceiling is so powerful, that in fact I've never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye it is like red blood that's wet on the wall.... A little red is usually enough, but to work with an entire red surface was a challenge."

In this the red ceiling I love the way the image is been taken and how the red color makes it powerful as Eggleston says to work with entire red surface was a challenge .Eggleston photography in this image is one of contemporary art photography its strong and powerful as the way he thought to take the ceiling on that time .

Reference

http://www.egglestontrust.com/

http://www.farewellkodachrome.com/?p=98

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/eggleston/eggleston.html

Feminism

Saudi feminism, a hotel for women only

The Luthan hotel in the north of Riyadh will try to put an end to the problems of Saudi women who travel and work in the country, and who always need special authorization to reserve a room in 'mixed' hotels. The rhythm of a woman's life in Saudi Arabia is marked by the permits that male figures of reference must approve before she can do anything, from driving a car to reserving a hotel room to working. The Luthan spa is a hotel for women only, the first of its kind in the Gulf and the only one where no special permissions will be necessary. The hotel emerged from the idea of a group of businesswomen who wanted to resolve some of the difficulties that Saudi women face. The chairperson of the board of partners is Princess Madawi Bint Mohammad Bin Abdullah, who says they have obtained approval from Sultan Bin Salman, secretary general of the Saudi tourism commission.

The current laws in Saudi Arabia do not allow 'mixing' among the sexes, and businesswomen who travel for their work often find themselves in unpleasant situations when the moment arrives to check in to a hotel. The hotels of the kingdom will accommodate only women who are accompanied by a male family member, or in possession of a written permit granted by a manager at their workplace, or by the police.

I really like the idea and it’s just a start of women’s problems issues with the special authorization like traveling as a women alone its must have an authorization from a father or brother, life women in Saudi Arabia is changing to the Good with King Abulla applauded a statement that women they will drive cars someday. Women then called for a dialogue to convince opponents of female driving to change their mis-conceptions. that the issue required patience, and he would not impose it against the will of the people. He noted that women drive on the kingdom's deserts and in rural areas. "I believe strongly in the rights of women", he said during his first TV interview adding: "I believe the day will come when women drive. In time, I believe it will be possible. And I believe patience is a virtue.

Women life in Saudi Arabia lives changing for the better in Saudi Arabia but slowly. The Ladies Kingdom has given several women the chance to start their own businesses, including an artist who has a small gallery. Women entrepreneurs will be able to rent office space in a soon toopen business center.

Reference

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fh52m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWgmpUH0Mz8

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/hotels/2008-01-21-saudi-women_N.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7305549.stm

http://www.luthanspa.com/default.htm

http://www.allbusiness.com/mining/oil-gas-extraction-crude-petroleum-natural/584794-1.html

Modernism/post modernism

Modernism in Saudi Arabia :

The geographical region of the Arab land has frame the cultural background of the country relates to modernism of Arab world. The Arab world includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, and spreads over the Middle East (or the Eastern Mediterranean. Most Arab countries gained their independence from British and French colonial rule between the end of World War II and the mid 1950s.

Modernists focused on innovative forms of expression and rejected realism and creating and shaping the world and Arab world (specifically art/architecture/things that make up culture). Modernism can be a way of thinking that supports the ability of humans to be able to change their environment in ways that make it more practical for their use. Although the political, economic and social environments since the 19th century have caused the decline of traditional arts in the Arab world It also rejects boundaries between high and "low" forms of art. By the middle of the 20th century, modern Arab had developed, based on Western aesthetics and norms; and by the end of the 20th century all Arab countries had extended modern art movements that reflected their cultural and artistic growth.

The Bicycle is a larger-than-life sculpture of a bicycle and is the most famous landmark in Jeddah

Example is The King Fahd Causeway is multiple dikes - bridge combination connecting Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and the island of Kingdom of Bahrain.1982

Example of a modernist building in Saudi Arabia is the Department of defence

Postmodernism: The modern is always historically at war with what comes immediately before it in this same sense, modern is always post-something. Postmodernism deals with the idea that if something is meaningless that it is not important to focus on finding meaning like how some gallerys end up in burnes empty rooms, it’s about having fun with creating it . Edge of Arabia, which opened on October 16th at the Brunei Gallery, school of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, offers a unique opportunity to see the work of 17 contemporary artists from Saudi Arabia.

Installation art is an good example of post modern art.Ayman Yossri Daydban

The Choice photograph by Manal Al Dowayan

The Kingdom Tower in Riyadh is the tallest skyscraper in Saudi Arabia

Lionel Mill's film has unique access to Prince Saud bin Abdul Mohsen, one of the rulers of the rich, powerful and secretive Saudi royal family. This is a fascinating insight into the conflicts between tradition and modernity in one of the world's most conservative and autocratic countries.

References

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fh52m

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk_mvSp1xmA

http://worldslongestbridges.blogspot.com/2009/12/worlds-longest-bridges.html

http://susieofarabia.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/larger-than-life-bicycle-sculpture/

http://susieofarabia.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/skywatch-jeddah-sculpture/

http://www.saudiarabian.tv/?p=1140

http://www.menassat.com/?q=en/news-articles/5101-expressionism-saudi-fine-arts-its-time-document

http://www.thegarretboys.com/news/saudinews.htm

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2003/modern_art_from_the_arab_world

http://www.galenfrysinger.com/saudi_arabia_modern_architecture.htm

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia/photos/11_ayman_yossri_daydban

http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/articles/2008/edge_of_arabia/photos/08_manal_al_dowayan

http://www.djibnet.com/photo/saudi+arabia/kingdom-tower-1145676387.html

Introducing Postmodernism", by Richard Appignanesi (Author), Chris Garratt

Cinema project

This project is inspired by the intimate relation between photography and cinema ,from lightning,set design to a narrative, port rating characters and locations through film stills.
I was inspired in this project by the film "The Indian in The Cupboard" by Banks,Lynne Ride and Brok Cole. Garden City, N.Y.:Doubleday,1980.

My images is been inspired by the Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri an urban environments photographer . He is recognized for his actual landscapes by simulating shallow depth of filed via the use of tilt-shift lens photography.And Slinkachu photography Slinkachu has attracted a cult audience for his photographs of tiny, hand-painted figures in unlikely urban settings.
And the lighting is been inspired by David Levinthal an American photographer,Levinthal uses a small toys and props with dramatic lighting to construct mini environments of subject matters.

a series images is been taken for my first year photography Cinema project,and my plot story is "A girl is suffering from asthma, smoking heavily every day cant realize how smoking is effecting her health. Its been told from the doctors that she have to quit smoking.
A little toys " Miniature" plastic toy figures in her living room they come bake to life when she go's to sleep. The miniatures steeling her cigarettes from her cigarettes from her packet and throw them from the balcony so when she wake up she founds nothing in the destroyed packet.
They are trying to help here without she knows" .

Nan Goldin

Biography

Nan Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is an American fine-art and documentary photographer. She has been represented in America exclusively by Matthew Marks Gallery since 1992 and Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris.

Goldin was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Boston, Massachusetts suburb of Lexington. After attending the nearby Lexington High School, she enrolled at the Satya Community School in Lincoln, where a teacher introduced her to the camera in 1968; Goldin was then fifteen years old. Her first solo show, held in Boston in 1973, was based on her photographic journeys among the city's gay and transsexual communities, to which she had been introduced by her friend David Armstrong. Goldin graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome prints.
Following graduation, Goldin moved to New York City. She began documenting the post-punk new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. These snapshot aesthetic images depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments. Most of her Ballad subjects were dead by the 1990s, lost either to drug overdose or AIDS; this tally included close friends and often-photographed subjects Greer Lankton and Cookie Mueller. In 2003, The New York Times nodded to the work's impact, explaining Goldin had "forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last twenty years." In addition to Ballad, she combined her Bowery pictures in two other series: "I'll Be Your Mirror" (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and "All By Myself."
Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45 minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. .

Goldin's work since 1995 has included a wide array of subject matter: collaborative book projects with famed Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki; New York City skylines; uncanny landscapes (notably of people in water); her lover, Siobhan; and babies, parenthood and family life.

I have chosen this image for Nan Goldin because I want to see her different in her others most known pictures ,

Goldin lives in New York and Paris—one reason the French Pompidou Centre mounted a major retrospective of her work in 2002. Her hand was injured in a fall in 2002, and she currently retains less ability to turn it than in the past .
In 2006, her exhibition, Chasing a Ghost, opened in New York. It was the first installation by her to include moving pictures, a fully narrative score, and voiceover, and included the disturbing three-screen slide and video presentation Sisters, Saints, & Sybils. The work involved her sister Barbara's suicide and how she coped through a numerous amount of images and narratives. Her works are developing more and more into cinemaesque features, exemplifying her graviation towards working with films.
She was presented the 2007 Hasselblad Award on 10 November, 2007.

Criticism

Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil."
Portrayal in film
The photographs by the character Lucy Berliner, played by actress Ally Sheedy in the 1998 film High Art, were based on those by Goldin.

Links to her gallery:
http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/nan-goldin/
http://www.artnet.com/artist/7135/nan-goldin.html
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/fineman/fineman12-12-96.asp
http://www.lightstalkers.org/images/show/826903
http://www.marissaneave.com/2008/05/oh-nan-goldins-heartbeat/


Nan Goldin Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z3sihEuiEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgL37xpBntw

Madame Yevonde

The Machine Worker in Summer, 1937

Permaprint day-transfer print from original negative.
Madam Yevonde She setup her own portrait studio in Victoria, London establishing a very different approach to photography by placing her sitters against dark background with faces well lit but turned slightly away from the camera. It is however for her mastery of the VIVEX process for which Madam Yevonde is best known. This process used three glass quarter-plates for the cyan, magenta and yellow separations, Which were proceeded separately and then brought together at the printing stage to produce an image with full color range. As the process used pigments and not dyes and could be manipulated at both the exposure and printing stage it led to vibrant color with a destiny and richness unachievable in other photographic processes of the day.

Madame Yevonde was born inCumbers in 1893, to a wealthy family in Streatham. At 16 she was shipped off to stifling convent schools in Belgium and France, which left her with a desire to be as independent as possible and a passion for the suffragette movement. But on her return to Britain, Yevonde studied with the London society photographer Lallie Charles, turning down an apprenticeship with Lena Connell, the suffragette photographer. At Charles’ Curzon Street studio Yevonde spent an apprenticeship cajoling Edwardian ladies into insipid poses on Empire chairs and bearskin rugs while they clutched bouquets of silk roses. After a year she transferred to ‘The Works’, the production side of Charles’ studio, and learned printing and retouching.
Round about 1925, she also began to undertake advertising work and other commercial assignments for magazines and started exhibiting her work at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society.
The rich colour resolution obtained with the process, with strong luminous reds and yellows and vibrant highlights, ideally matched her own extrovert personality. By 1932, Madame Yevonde felt sufficiently confident of her mastery of the new medium to rent a gallery and hold her first full-scale exhibition of her work consisting of no fewer than 70 images, half of them in colour. When Madame Yevonde called in with her portfolio, they were completely bowled over and commissioned her to supply four images of artists and craftsmen at work decorating the interior of the ship.
Madame Yevonde continued working almost exclusively in colour right through to the end of the decade, despite the looming threat of war, resonances of which crept increasingly into her work. For Madame Yevonde, this was a bitter blow, bringing to an abrupt end a period of the most intensely dedicated and uniquely creative pioneering work in the whole history of colour photography. At the end of the war, she moved back into London again and continued to work at the Berkeley Square studio, with all its memories of happier times. VIVEX, however, was dead and buried, and although other colour processes became available in time, Madame Yevonde very rarely used them, deeming them all far too crude in comparison with VIVEX.
When the lease on the Berkeley Square studio ran out in 1955, Madame Yevonde found other premises just off Knightsbridge, close to Harrods' store. Other work featured in a Royal Photographic Society exhibition devoted entirely to women photographers in 1958. Around this time, Madame Yevonde also started experimenting with solarisation, while an exhibition at her Knightsbridge studio in 1961 entitled 'Dove or Predator?' featured a series of portraits of women in which she attempted to divide them broadly into these two categories. Pride of place went to portraits of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, photographed at the Jubilee Palace in Addis Ababa, as well as portraits of other members of his family, and some of his pet lions.
The 1968 exhibition 'Some Distinguished Women' featured some of the famous women she had photographed over the course of her long career, but also included a number of portraits specifically taken for the exhibition. To celebrate Madame Yevonde's eightieth birthday and her sixty years in portrait photography, the Royal Photographic Society mounted an impressive retrospective exhibition consisting of about a hundred of her best images covering every aspect of her vast and memorable output. The exhibition and the interview were a fitting tribute to her as an artist and a champion of women's rights, as well as a great pioneering spirit.
Despite failing health, Madame Yevonde continued working to within a few months of her death in December 1975.

Reference

www.madameyevonde.com
http://www.users.waitrose.com/~felice/

Melanie Manchot cyprus street

Whitechapel Gallery





Artist Melanie Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party. presents the first part of her new project ‘Celebration,’ commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. The exhibition brings together archive material portraying the rich history of public street celebrations in London’s East End, forming a poignant commentary on the changing demographics and social climate of east London’s communities. These documents form the basis for a major new film, which will depict the construction of a group portrait that takes an east London residential street as its setting and involves its residents as active participants. Capturing the persons best facial features and creates beautiful photos that have a lot of truth in them in the shot and the way subjects in the frame. The way she used the light in her shooting had a nice stand positioned above and next to the model's head, with the light pointing as close to straight down as she could, in order to catch the highlights of the hair. Using the street and the people in East London to document the event and display it at the gallery as that I was with them in a very move. Showing the multicultural community how happy and friendly they are, the colors and sun shine in the images makes me feel worm.

reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSyqm2tt1I0
http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/details/celebration/