Michael Carroll

Michael Carroll Biography

Mike Carroll is the founder and current President of Romanian Children's Relief and their Romanian partner charity, Fundatia Inocenti. In January 1990, Carroll was one of the first photographers to travel to Romania after the fall of the communist regime. His stories, which were written and photographed for The Boston Globe and The New York Times, led directly to the formation of the Romanian Children's Relief organization.

Since 1980, Mike has worked as a freelance photographer and media-design consultant specializing in corporate and editorial photography with clients including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, People, Golf & Travel, Travel & Leisure Golf, Newsweek, Business Week, Money and Fortune.

Since 1990, Carroll has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe writing and photographing for American and European publications, including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, People, Fortune and Reader's Digest.

His corporate clients have included Disney, Compaq, Malden Mills, Beth Israel Hospital, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, American Express and General Motors Corp.

www.sxu.edu

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis, the third of fifteen children, was born in Ribe, Denmark, on 3rd May, 1849. He worked as a carpenter in Copenhagen before emigrating to the United States in 1870. Unable to find work, he was often forced to spend the night in police station lodging houses. Riis did a variety of menial jobs before finding work with a news bureau in New York City in 1873. The following year he was recruited by the South Brooklyn News. In 1877 Riis became a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Aware of what it was like to live in poverty, Riis was determined to use this opportunity to employ his journalistic skills to communicate this to the public. He constantly argued that the "poor were the victims rather than the makers of their fate". In 1888 Riis was employed as a photo-journalist by the New York Evening Sun. Riis was among the first photographers to use flash powder, which enabled him to photograph interiors and exteriors of the slums at night. He also became associated with what later became known as muckraking journalism. In December, 1889, an account of city life, illustrated by photographs, appeared in Scribner's Magazine. This created a great deal of interest and the following year, a full-length version, How the Other Half Lives, was published. The book was seen by Theodore Roosevelt, the New York Police Commissioner, and he had the city police lodging houses that were featured in the book closed down. (Us arises.htm)

Robert Frank

Frank was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Switzerland. His mother, Rosa, was Swiss, but his father, Hermann, had become stateless after World War I and had to apply for the Swiss citizenship of Frank and his older brother, Manfred. Though Frank and his family remained safe in Switzerland during World War II, the threat of Nazism nonetheless affected his understanding of oppression. He turned to photography, in part as a means to escape the confines of his business-oriented family and home, and trained under a few photographers and graphic designers before he created his first hand-made book of photographs, 40 Fotos, in 1946. Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947, and secured a job in New York City as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar. He soon left to travel in South America and Europe. He created another hand-made book of photographs that he shot in Peru, and returned to the U.S. in 1950. That year was momentous for Frank, who, after meeting Edward Steichen, participated in the group show 51 American Photographers at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA); he also married fellow artist Mary Frank née Mary Lockspeiser, with whom he had two children, Andrea and Pablo. Though he was initially optimistic about the United States' society and culture, Frank's perspective quickly changed as he confronted the fast pace of American life and what he saw as an overemphasis on money. He now saw America as an often bleak and lonely place, a perspective that became evident in his later photography. Frank's own dissatisfaction with the control that editors exercised over his work also undoubtedly colored his experience. He continued to travel, moving his family briefly to Paris. In 1953, he returned to New York and continued to work as a freelance photojournalist for magazines including McCall's, Vogue, and Fortune. Associating with other contemporary photographers such as Saul Leiter and Diane Arbus, he helped form what Jane Livingston has termed The New York School of photographers during the 1940s and 1950s. (Wikipedia)

Gary Winogram

Granted that simplicity is a virtue; beyond this it is too complex a matter to generalize about with impunity. One might add with reasonable confidence that simple does not mean vacuous, obvious, plain, habitual, formulated, banal, or empty. The ability to produce pictures richly complex in their description would seem to be intrinsic to photography; indeed, this characteristic might almost be considered a simple fact of the medium. Nevertheless, much of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been --- for lack of a better word --- simpler. This has been achieved in many ways: by printing techniques that have allowed radical manipulation, by soft-focus lenses, stage lighting, high-contrast negatives, exaggerated grain, corrective filters, or worm's- or bird's-eye perspectives; by photographing details close up, or two-dimensional subjects (such as old walls); or simply by printing the picture very dark or very light. Stated this baldly these various experiments sound less interesting and less productive (and simpler) than they were in historical fact. In practice the struggle for visual coherence is continuous; when one problem is solved, a more difficult one rises in its place. In photography the formal issue might be stated as this: How much of the camera's miraculous descriptive power is the photographer capable of handling? Or how much complexity can he make simple? Or, conversely, how much diversity must he sacrifice for the sake of order? Consider Garry Winogrand's picture: so rich in fact and suggestion, and so justly resolved, more complex and more beautiful than the movie that Alfred Hitchcock might derive from it.

Amelia Lyon

A great photographer, this is the link to her blog http://www.amelialyon.net/personal/

Paul strand post assigmnent answers

1 i tried to take pictures from different viewing angles. 2 i was trying to give depth to the subject of the photo. 3 first i chose a good spot with enough light but not too much, then i tried to get a good result. 4 i like how the shadows look. 5 no 6 i could try to take better light balanced photos

Pre/Post assignment questions

1 What lessons or experiences did you “synthesize and analyze” to come up with your original idea-- what was your assignment. 2 How did you evaluated your work, what were you looking to create for the assignment, and was this idea a good idea? 3 And what steps did you take to create your assignment? 4 What do you like best about your images? 5 Did you have trouble with some part of this assignment? 6 How could you improve your image or process?

Close up assignment!!

Check out this Photography blog!

http://www.robertkruh.com/blog/

Julia Margaret Cameron

One of the greatest portraitists in the history of photography—indeed in any medium—Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879) blended an unorthodox technique, a profoundly spiritual sensibility, and a Pre-Raphaelite–inflected aesthetic to create a gallery of vivid portraits and a mirror of the Victorian soul. When she received her first camera in 1863 as a Christmas gift from her daughter and son-in-law, Cameron was forty-eight, a mother of six, and a deeply religious, well-read, somewhat eccentric friend of many notable Victorian artists, poets, and thinkers. “From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour,” she wrote, “and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.” Condemned by some contemporaries for sloppy craftsmanship, she purposely avoided the perfect resolution and minute detail that glass negatives permitted, opting instead for carefully directed light, soft focus, and long exposures that allowed her sitters’ slight movement to register in her pictures, instilling them with a sense of breath and life. An exhibition of her portraits will be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from August 19, 2013 through January 5, 2014. (yahoo.com)

Paul Strand assigment!!

Some examples of Paul Strand`s photography, he uses shadows to show the depth of objects.

Paul Strand

On October 16, 1890, a boy was born in New York City to a family of Bohemian immigrants. The world did not yet know that this boy would grow up to be Paul Strand, a world-renowned photographer, known best for his early abstractions. Strand was given his first camera by his father when he was twelve years old, and at fourteen attended school at the Ethical Culture School. He was taught by documentary photographer Lewis Hine, who was working on a project involving taking photos of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Strand soon decided to join Hine's ventures and he was taken to the Photo-Secession Gallery on Fifth Avenue where he first encountered the works of Alfred Stieglitz, David Octavius Hill, Clarence White, and several others. This experience led him to take his photography more seriously and, he hoped, change the world. (yahoo.com)

Hey!! ready for nice pics?