Tag Archives: portrait

Feb 25

The story of the girl in Mary Ellen Mark’s iconic photo

mary-ellen-mark-001

Amanda and her Cousin Amy: Mary Ellen Mark photographed Amanda Marie Ellison, 9 (right), and Amy Minton Velasquez, 8, in Valdese, North Carolina, in 1990.

(Courtesy of Mary Ellen Mark Studio and Library)

A good photograph can speak volumes about its subjects, yet still leave you wanting to know more.

The acclaimed and prolific American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who died May 25 at the age of 75, was known for her humanist portraits: homeless children in Seattle, prostitutes in India, a family living out of its car. In 1990, she took one of her most memorable shots, titled Amanda and her cousin Amy.

“This photograph raises a lot of questions and leaves me with a slightly uneasy feeling,” says Jeff Jacobson, a New York photographer and a friend of Mark’s. “That, I feel, over and over again is the hallmark of her best work.”

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Dec 13

Stefanie Schneider’s work with expired Polaroid film

Long Way Home 1

Stefanie Schneider lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.

Stefanie’s scintillating situations take place in the American West. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines and a cast of phantasmic characters. She works with the largely uncontrollable chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock.

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Dec 5

Amazing (non-digital) dreamscapes by JeeYoung Lee

Resurrection

It’s amazing to witness an artist who embraces one of their greatest limitations, turning it instead into one of their greatest advantages.

For Korean artist JeeYoung Lee the question was how to utilise her small studio space in Seoul measuring  just 3.6m x 4.1m x 2.4m (11.8′ x 13.5′ x 7.8′). Instead of finding a new location or reverting to digital trickery, Lee challenged herself to build some of the most elaborate sets imaginable for the sake of making a single photograph.

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Sep 8

Photographer explores resemblance in family members

(Twins: Alex & Sandrine, 20)

Ulric Collette is a French-Canadian photographer who shoots quirky family portraits. In his photo series ‘Genetic Portraits‘, Ulric photographs family members and then crops each image in half, then positions the different halves side-by-side to create a single portrait.

The resulting composite highlights the similarities between the two people photographed, and demonstrates just how fascinating genetics really are.

Interestingly, if you view each half of the images individually, you can clearly observe how different each person is, but when viewed together as the composite image, you notice so many similarities.

Here are more images from this intriguing series…

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