The museum is small and has probably 40-50 photographs displayed and a few other displays that push the edge of defined photography. The works in the museum all focus around the Shanghai, China. It is a city of vast population growth and vast development blending east and west quicker than it can comprehend it. The subjects in the museum focus around this phenomena with focuses on entertainment, young and old, building construction, wealth, attitude and an infinite amount of other focuses in the work exhibited that could be pulled from observation of it.  

I found Isidro Blasco’s diorama-like work of several photographs that blends architecture and photography together and of course mixes it with Shanghai influence. Blasco’s piece is a 3-dimensional city made of photographs essentially; it is as if someone made an architectural model made solely of one-dimensional photographs pasted onto a wooden frame that brings some photos to the forefront of the eye and others to the background and others to the side of each photograph that sits parallel to the viewer therefore altogether creating a 3-dimensional city view. Each picture is taken birds-eye view of some portion of what looks almost like a skyline. It includes the ground and bases of buildings in the series of pictures that make the bottom of the image. The next layer of pictures that sort of protrudes out farther than the first row of pictures follows and so on until the top of the 3-dimensional image is blue sky. It is like Blasco had an actual scale of height and surface area for each layer of the image to create the 3-dimesnional effect. It is very creative and attentive to detail.

I admired Zhou Xiaohu’s large photograph of an inner-city block that was decrepit, obsolete and falling apart while being consumed by the new development all around it of fresh, new design and fancy architecture. It is a direct and perfect display of gentrification and how it theoretically works in a city of vast growth.

The other piece I really enjoyed was that of Zhu Feng. Makeshift sculptures created at construction sites like piles of dirt disinterred from the site of new constructions and the piles of wood from tearing down an old building. Feng photographs various types of detritus at construction sites that has a sort of neat clutter in some way. The photographs question the intention of the new fabrications using the clutter and chaos prior to the opposed sophisticated completion in a new building.

I think that a flower in its simplest and purest form in a photograph can really speak loudly for itself; it can mean different things for different people and represent ideas and attitudes that sometimes might be difficult to express. Things that grow in nature have a way of explaining the things we can’t express in words that are only symbols of our true emotion and expression.

I chose to photograph flowers, in the untouched and natural form that they are. The texture and depth of different floral species are beautiful and can evoke a new impression of what we often overlook as something we feel we already understand and can overlook…it’s just a flower. If a well-done photograph of a flower can hold someone’s attention and surprise them in a way they haven’t been before over the image of a flower, then I have done what I meant to do.

One critic of Shelby Lee’s work had the opinion that the story and background of each photograph is missing for the viewer, and because of that, it leaves the viewer to only misunderstand the portrait and the life of the people photographed. I can certainly understand this claim, because quite honestly part way through the film, I as a viewer only saw a stereotype come true and be virtually exaggerated to a certain case of extremes. If every person who saw Shelby’s work in organized fashion may it be museum or organized publishing, also had the information and background of his work conveyed in The True Meaning of Pictures, then there would be no question as to what the pictures are meant to do or meant to represent. Shelby’s relationship with his photographs is very different than what the viewer will immediately perceive for as one critic stated, there are years of history carrying stereotypes that every viewer is aware of whereas the viewer probably won’t be aware of Shelby’s attitude and relationship with his photographs’ subjects.

I think that Shelby’s sincerity and friendship with the family, which carries a great deal of respect and trust speaks loudly for his claim that he does not intend in any way to sell the proliferation of a stereotype. He also grew up in the environment in a middle class family and understood the way of life in Appalachia. As one person in the film noted, I don’t know what I would think of Shelby’s work if he did not have the personal background with the environment that he photographs.

“People say I photograph the worst—I do not photograph the worst. With the Napier’s, I have stopped photographing” –Shelby Lee Adams

 The initial impression of only looking at Cindy Sherman’s work immediately suggests that all of her work is pivoted on women; all of Sherman’s portraits are portrayals of women. Further, her portraits seems to portray women in several different attitudes and identities; her portraits seem to resemble women in positions and actions conveying the hard life of women as supporters of a world that leaves them under-accredited for the work they give forth. Sherman’s photographs aim to seemingly uncover the layers of the woman depicted and represent a universal feminine attitude of fatigued reality. The women in her photographs do not cover sun tan lines or bother to cover their nudity exposed by the transparency of their clothing. However, her photographs continuing to display this universal femininity also depict stalwart women with aprons and a sweaty, dirty facial demeanor with hair disheveled from household chores (household assumingly by their setting) with clothing and hairstyles of the 1940s-1950s. It seems that she looks to portray the raw, below the surface beauty of a woman, underneath it all and unhidden from what life really is.

Enjoy…

The background of the picture is so colorful and rich with the texture from the coloration and layering of the colors together that it seems as if this were the focus of the picture and the reason for the pretty, flowering branch in the focus instead is used to echo the background of the picture on a more macrocosmic basis.

If I had to name this photograph, I would call it The chilly warmth of Fall.

http://utopic-man.deviantart.com/art/mystic-spring-138171116

Hey everybody, my name is Kyle Shiel. Blogging is totally new for me, so this will be fun getting used to it. Most of all in this class inside the digital cinema field, I hope to learn about exposure and using the proper tools for great pictures. I love landscapes and still photography, and I am excited to become proficient with it. I’d like to see my pictures improve and be able to show them off to friends and guests of the homestead. Photography is neat and I am curious to see new ways to express it and utilize it and enjoy it.