Carlos Cazalis Analysis

Carlos Cazallis is a Spanish Photographer, designer, and -lnkmaker who grew up in five different countries in North and South America.

He first began photographing at the age of 14 in Argentina.He Then pursued a degree in Marine Biology at the University of Miami in 1987. After a 23-year absence from Mexico he returned and started working for a local newspaper and freelancing with Agence France-Presse until 1999 when he was decided to study more at  Parsons School of Design this is where he completed his MFA in Digital Design. Soon after he returned back to Mexico in 2004 to photograph and has been documenting world events in over 15 countries ever since. His main focus has been on human rights and habitat issues.

In 2005 Cazallis began photographing in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil documenting habitat issues. It was here he found an abandoned textile factory which had become home to around 483 families.This was to be his start of The Urban Meta project.The project adresses the consequences of urban growth, it does thus through revealing  photographs documenting things such as environmental damage and mass urban growth. Since 2005 the project has gone onto Osaka, Tehran.

holds a collection of the largests mansions in town and a few high class residentials buildings. It is also home to the State governor.

 This is a photograph by cazallis, its a very sticking and slightly  heartbreaking photograph when the context is taken aboard.Here in this photograph features two young girls, young toddlers even sitting on the hard stony ground eating oranges. From the source where i obtained this picture they described this picture as "Children from a slum district eating oranges picked from the wealthy Morumbi area.Morumbi is a district of the city of São Paulo belonging to the subprefecture of Butantã, in the southwestern part of the city.

It holds a collection of the largests mansions in town and a few high class residentials buildings. It is also home to the State governor. So in actual fact Morumbi is quite a wealthy country which makes this picture that much horrid. I also like the manipulation Cazallis has done in this piece he has increased the contrast and darkened the brightness to make these children the subject of the photograph.

This photograph is more common when browsing the works of Cazallis. This is a city scape picture of the city of brazil. Again here Cazallis has used a increased contrast and dark brightness.The shadows of the buildings on this photograph is also very nice, the photograph being captured this way really makes the city seem urban and gritty.

In Brazil most Brazilians live in cities – 138 million, as opposed to 32 million who live outside the cities. The biggest cities are in the South East, with São Paulo having a population of over 19 million people and Rio de Janeiro over 11 million.The common place for housing in brazil is in high flats or apartments. This picture really captures the contrast between wealth on the lower portion of the image we have raggedy buildings with pieces of steel used for roofs, the the left distance a football pitch can be seen which is again associated with poor brazilian children.The juxtaposition of these old building and newer flats links into the theme of growth and evolution well as it shows growth and development.

Overall I like Cazalli's style of documenting the change in mexico and other urban countries and i especially like the way he has started with something personal begin his hometown and evolved from there on.

Bethany De Forest Analysis

Bethany de Forest works and lives in Amsterdam as an artist and pinhole-photographer.
During art school Bethany started creating  diorama’s her objective was to show a realistic and imaginary world.With an ordinary camera the images remained too distant so Bethany resorted to a pinhole camera where she felt she was able to capture the feelings more easily.

Her inspiration comes from objects she finds or materials that appeal to her.She uses candle wax to build an ice palace and colored candy for a colorful dollhouse, while thousands of sugar cubes are used to construct the King Frogís castle. She taught herself the skills to construct a church-like building, which she then covered with meat appearing as stained glass.
Being a pinhole photographer Bethany is view of the world is quite distorted. Her everyday surroundings are looked at with a pinhole eye. Sugar cubes can be used to build a sugar palace, Meat looks like marble, vegetables form a jungle and chicken-feet are tree-trunks.

This is a excellent example of De Forest's work relating to my above description. This image directly shows Bethany's love for crossing reality with aspects of her imagination, for example the reality part of this photograph is of course the sunset and the imagination aspects are the toy cars neatly parked to resemble some sort of co-ordinated traffic.

The colours in this photograph are very vivid and strong this sort of colour composition would of have to have come by either using lomography film or later manipulation. This photograph was set in the Stonehenge as its iconic shape sticks out from the background. Although the cars in this piece are toy cars they don't appear to be at first especially if the composition wasn't particularly big.

This is another picture from Bethany's collection. This picture features frogs holding hands around a crystal bowl. This image is a lot more imaginary then made to be realistic aspects that convey this is the toy frogs, and the mosaic sweet made flooring. Inside the crystal ball is a starfish this could be to respond it with the theme of underwater creatures. The crystal ball might actually be the only element to this piece which is actually real. The colour in this piece is more randomized and explorative when compared to the previous structured high contrast piece.

 I like Bethany's use of old techniques with new approaches however I do feel that some of the pieces she produces are very much cheesy and childlike in the sense that it becomes unskilful and uninteresting. Her style works best more subtly like in the first picture whereby the only imaginary aspect is the toy cars and not the whole composition. Another Photographer that does this is Justin Quinell, Justin is a UK pinhole photographer  and he takes a rather different approach to Bethany. He particularly loves pinhole photography because of the excitement of not knowing how the image is going to turn out he compares it to life and says "if you knew what was going to happen tomorrow you might as well top yourself". Justin has experimented with a range of different objects to make his pinhole cameras from small ones to do the mouthpiece pinholes to large wheelie bin cameras to take pictures of whole scenery.

Phillip Toledano Analysis

Toledano was born in London, to a French Moroccan mother and a American father. His qualifications include a BA in English Literature however he states his art influence came from watching his father who was a full time artist. Toledano’s work varies in medium from photography to installation, sculpture and painting and he focuses on socio-political themes however the piece I am going to focus on is deeply personal to him and also had a very emotional connection with me.

The piece I’m going to focus on is called ‘’Day’s with my Father’’. This piece is a series of images all illustrating the time he spend with his father after the death of his mother, Some images in this narrative are illustrated with notes explaining why he took the photograph and the state of mind his father was in at the time. Toledano clearly states that to him this piece of art is a journal of his on-going relationship with his father.

This image is the first of the series; it sets the scene for the images to follow. He describes here that his father hasn’t got Alzheimer but no short-term memory, and is often lost. To describe his mental state more so he tells us about the day he took his father to his mother’s funeral and afterwards when his father would ask him every 15minutes where his wife was. He narrates that eventually it became too much for him to relive the pain of knowing his mother was dead and telling his father this again and again so instead he told him she’d gone to Paris to look after her brother.

In this picture we assume that it’s his mother and father hugging and on his description he states his mother passed away in 2006, which is still fairly recent so it could be her or it could be his wife Clara. Either way the passion from the way her eyes are closed as she hugs this man and the intimacy on how close they are connotates that this is a couple.

The words beside this help the viewer to understand the concept of each photograph particularly this one, as it’s the only one in the series that features his mother.Taking note that this is the most powerful image in this series Toledano does it justice the way in which he captured this has such emotion pouring from it and more so if he ended on this photograph, however starting on it does establish the mood an enables the following photographs to flow beside it.

This is the third to last photograph in this series, I chose to pick this particular picture because all of Toledano's Pictures capture the gritty and beautiful aspects of his father's illness and his relationship with him during his last years, however this particular photograph and its words made a very emotional connection with me. As I was reading the words acted as a voiceover in my head to this emotional drama I was watching. "Sometimes, when we're talking, my dad will stop, and sigh and close his eyes. Its then that I know that he knows. About my mum. About everything".

The sadness in this portrait demonstrates what Toledano states, his father looks in deep distress with his eyes closed and head titled forward suggests this. Toledano used a light hitting from the left to produce a dark effect on one side of the face, black also connotates most things depressing such as death, which could be what Toledano's father is remembering.

This is again one of the last pictures from the series. However this is the one that made my heart sink, In this picture he describes how his Father died. The emotion on his face with his glass red eyes and head titled displays such emotion that cant be staged. He describes his father passing "yesterday" meaning the death is still very raw but he still managed to have his photograph taken of what must have been a very hard time.

I admire Phillip Toledano's courage in sharing this very personal story with the world. Each photograph bursting with emotion and memories. I think this series of photographs very much relates to the idea of evolving and growing as I think by going through this Toledano evolved and grew as person. 

Evaluation Of Personal Project.

The theme for this project was ‘Personal Project’. I have interpreted the theme by creating my own theme of Depression; I’ve reflected my contemporary research findings in this work by using artist Barbara Kruger for inspiration.

To begin with I drew out a large mind map in my sketchbook, as my chosen pathway was portraiture I came up with ideas that expressed this best.

I then decreased all of the sketchy ideas to 4 main ideas to which my themes were relationships, loneliness /Isolation, Distortion and Mood changes. However I soon dropped Mood changes as an idea and just developed the others.

To get inspiration for these ideas I looked up photographers that expressed these themes in their artwork, amongst whom I found Jamie Diamond, Richard Vantielcke and Thomas Jackson, Each of these photographers had very different ideas about each of my themes and I adored the way they perceived them.

Jamie Diamond was expressing the relationship between mother and child and used her relationship with her mother to recreate this using a plastic toy dolly, which she took to various locations and photographed it.

Richard Vantielcke who expressed isolation and alienation from others by being different and did this by placing a cardboard box on his head and walking around taking photographs, which illustrated a story.

Thomas Jackson who used science fiction and literature to create a darkly humorous narrative about a lonely robot's failure to exist with the natural world.

After analyzing these artists I decided to produce a Pinterest mood board again displaying my three themes in different exciting ways.

Whilst looking on Pinterest I found loads of images that depicted my themes differently from slow shutter speeds for distortion to candid shots of romance for relationships.

After these I looked at artists Andy Warhol and Miles Donovan and adopted their style to produce artworks with my first photo-shoot.

My first photo-shoot was images of people on the train I did this to convey the relationships between strangers and they were in sort of a time lapse of as one person gets on the train they might leave after a while or someone that is sitting on the train might gain a person. I used these images to create a Miles Donovan and Andy Warhol inspired piece-using Photoshop.

After this I took more photographs for my second theme distortion however I took these images at multiple viewpoints so that after I could construct little creations which is just what I did. With my first viewpoint images I produced a David Hockney style artwork, which made my models, face larger than his body, which was very effective for my them. Secondly with the multiple viewpoint images I produced a GIF of a model pulling on her face distorting it out of shape.

Then, I decided to conduct a third photo-shoot depicting my third theme of Loneliness/Isolation and these worked particularly well I had images of my model sitting on a bench playing a guitar and I also incorporated the distortion theme into the photo-shoot by producing images where my model shook his head on a slow shutter speed. After taking these photographs I wanted to improve the quality of them and imported them into Photoshop to manipulate them.

Soon after I took a trip to The Photographers Gallery to look at the exhibition Home truths which overall I found disturbing by informative. Then after reviewing my ideas in a essay style in my sketchbook I decided to take the idea of loneliness and take it to the next level by researching what type of illnesses it can be a symptom of in which I found depression.

After choosing this final theme I captured another photo-shoot trying out the very simple poses to convey this and after manipulating them I researched artist Barbara Kruger.

Barbara Kruger is famously known for her typography on found images, she uses quotes which question feminism, consumerism and classicism. Her bold lettering is produced by using a etching technique whereby she carves the letters into a metal plate and runs this through a etching machine.

I really liked her style and decided to incorporate her style into my final piece by producing 6 GIFS based on photographs I took in my final Depression themed photo-shoot. Although I am highly influenced by Barbara Kruger I wanted my piece to be more personal and not a copy of her work, which is why I changed certain aspects of her context, design and technique when creating my piece.

Each GIF portrayed something different from challenging common stereotypes people have of people suffering from depression to bringing out the subconscious of someone suffering from depression (taken from the NHS website) and factual information about depression also taken from the NHS website. I wanted these Gifs to be very flashy and quick to make the reader consume the information that is being given to them at first glance.

Although to improve my final piece I should have maybe used different models for the different photographs instead of the same model in each print this would make the text relate to the individual featured more.

Also, I could have perhaps personalized each image before putting the bold lettering on them as I only did this for a few of my images.

To create the Barbara Kruger lettering on my photographs I opted for a personalized way instead of using a etching technique, So to create this effect I first painted a piece of paper red and then cut strips from it and this was my base for my newspaper letters. The process of my final piece required a high attention span and sharp eyes as I had to manually search for the letters I needed though newspapers and this proved difficult when not all my required letters were there.

Overall I am Very pleased with my Final coursework outcome, a lot of hard work and research went into it as well as a lot of experimental photo shoots. I think my final outcome was really successful I accomplished what I set out to do and in the end it looked even better than I thought it would so for me that’s a accomplishment in itself.