Present- MICHAEL WOLF

Michael Wolf- Born in Munich, Germany. Living in Hong Kong

In 1994 Wolf was a contract photographer for Stern magazine, though in 2001 began to work on his own projects. He focus’ on life in mega cities. His work is displayed in many galleries worldwide, and has been published as books.

His first project he did was ‘the real toy story’. He collected thousands of plastic toys made inChina and stuck them around a room, surrounding photographs of Chinese factory workers. This piece was used to show the Scale of China’s mass production, and the west’s desire for these products.

One of Wolfs best know projects was ‘architecture of density’. This was based Hong Kong’s highly compressed architecture. By eliminating the skyAnd the ground from the images, it creates the illusionOf the structures being never ending.

Wolf’s most interesting project to me is ‘street view’. This image was taken from street view under the category ‘portraits’. All of the images in the portraits category are more of shapes and colours of faces rather than details. I would usually associate portraits with clear pictures of faces showing emotion, so interestingly they aren’t really like portraits at all. He created these images by taking photographs of Google street view scenes on his computer screen. This adds a lot of distortion. Wolf describes the series as ‘a statement about art’.

Past- ALFRED STIEGLITZ

Alfred Stieglitz- Born Hoboken, New Jersey 1864.

Alfred was founder of Photo-Secession, which fought to have photography recognised as an art form, and focused on the craftsmanship of photography.

Alfred’s photography reflects his vision for the future of photography as an art form.

Alfred liked to use natural elements in his work, as with this first image where he has photographed a snowy scene. For this photograph titled ‘Winter- Fifth Avenue’, he stood for hours in a blizzard hoping to achieve a soft-lens effect. He used natural elements in his images to create an atmosphere. He used weather to his advantage in his work instead of going to extensive lengths of editing to achieve his vision.

One method he used that was more extensive than these two for creating pleasing images, was making platinum prints. This is a process that allows the photographer to create a wide tonal range on the image using chemical development. I think that Alfred has used this process on the bottom image, titled ‘Looking Northwest from the Shelton’, as the tonal range is much greater on this image than the other two.