Feminism

Modernism/Postmodernism

Modernism is the term to describe cultural movements which took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the Western society. This refers to art, architecture, music, literature and applied arts that came out at this time. Modernism encouraged the re-examination of many things, including commerce to philosophy. Through examining them they aimed to find what was 'holding back' progress and found ways in which to replace it with better and more progressive ways. Believers of modernism usually rebel against 'tradiotional' forms of art, religious faith, etc. Modernist thinkers in the nineteenth century believed that daily life was becoming outdated. Some people divide the 20th Century into two movements – modernism and postmodernism. Others see them as two apects of the same movement. Some modernists believed that by rejecting traditional ideas they could discover new, radical ways of making art. Abstract artists made the assumption that colour and shape formed the essential characteristics of art. The main aspect of the modernism movement is the rejection of traditional ideas – things such as freedom of expression, experimentation and radicalism.

Semiotics

Semiotics represents a range of studies in art, literature, anthropology and the mass media rather than an independent academic discipline. Those involved in semiotics include linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, literary, aesthetic and media theorists, psychoanalysts and educationalists. Beyond the most basic definition, there is considerable variation amongst leading semioticians as to what semiotics involves. It is not only concerned with (intentional) communication but also with our ascription of significance to anything in the world. Semiotics has changed over time, since semioticians have sought to remedy weaknesses in early semiotic approaches. Even with the most basic semiotic terms there are multiple definitions. Consequently, anyone attempting semiotic analysis would be wise to make clear which definitions are being applied and, if a particular semiotician's approach is being adopted, what its source is. There are two divergent traditions in semiotics stemming respectively from Saussure and Peirce. The work of Louis Hjelmslev, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Julia Kristeva, Christian Metz and Jean Baudrillard (b 1929) follows in the 'semiological' tradition of Saussure whilst that of Charles W Morris, Ivor A Richards (1893-1979), Charles K Ogden (1989-1957) and Thomas Sebeok (b 1920) is in the 'semiotic' tradition of Peirce. The leading semiotician bridging these two traditions is the celebrated Italian author Umberto Eco, who as the author of the bestseller The Name of the Rose (novel 1980, film 1986) is probably the only semiotician whose film rights are of any value.

Lee Miller

Lee Miller was born 1907,was an American photographer. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907, she was a successful fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris where she became an established fashion and fine art photographer. During the Second World War, she became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine covering events such as the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau.In 1929, she traveled to Paris with the intention of apprenticing herself to the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. Although, at first, he insisted that he did not take students, Miller soon became his photographic assistant, as well as his lover and muse. While she was in Paris, she began her own photographic studio, often taking over Man Ray's fashion assignments to enable him to concentrate on his painting. In fact, many of the photographs taken during this period and credited to Man Ray were actually taken by Lee. Together with Man Ray, she rediscovered the photographic technique of solarisation. She was an active participant in the surrealist movement, with her witty and humorous images. Amongst her circle of friends were Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau. She even appeared as a statue that comes to life in Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1930).

Sally Mann

Sally Mann was born on May 1, 1951 in Lexington, Virginia to upper-middle class parents.
Her current projects include a series of self-portraits, a study of the effects of muscular dystrophy on her husband, portraits of intimate family life over the past 30 years, and a multipart study of the legacy of slavery in Virginia
today Sally Mann is known as one of the most influential female photographers in history. Her works are included in the permanent collections at some of the world’s finest museums, including:

* Metropolitan Museum of Art
* Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
* Corcoran Gallery of Art
* Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
* Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

In addition, Mann was named by Time magazine as "America's Best Photographer" in 2001 and her images have made the cover of The New York Times Magazine on multiple occasions.

William Eggleston

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi. His father was an engineer who had a failed career as a cotton farmer, and his mother was the daughter of a prominent local judge. As a boy, Eggleston was introverted and enjoyed playing the piano, drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was drawn to visual media; he reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines. Eggleston was also interested in audio technology as a child.First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle is a photographer and director who is known for fashion, advertising and fine art photography. He has a surreal and humorous style. He was born on March 11th 1963 in Conneticut. LaChapelle went to North Carolina School of the Arts. His first photograph was of his mother who wore a bikini and held a martini glass on the balcony. Soon after he became obsessed with photography. He was offered his first professional job by Andy Warhol for Interview magazine, and his book LaChapelle Land and Hotel LaChapelle which both contained vivid and bizarre portraits of celebrities. He was the director of Madonna's video for the 2005 hit "Hung Up" but fell apart due to creative differences. Also in the UK he directed the surreal Lost trailers for Channel 4 and showed the cast dancing in 1920's costume among the burning wreckage on the beach. He also directed Channel 4's promotion for Desperate Housewives (season one). His work has been described as surreal, ironic. He uses celebrities and exaggerates aspects of them or their superficial world.

August Sander

August sander is famous for his documentary and portraiture photography
Who documented the days of the Nazi regime which was of his series people of the 20th century which are of 60 personal selected photos.
His work captures the everyday lives of his hometown westerwald near cologne
And more than 600 hundred german people.
I enjoy looking at his portraits because it shows many people from different occupations which reflect German life.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus was an American photographer who is famous for her unconventional portraits or both ordinary and extraordinary citizens (such as transvestites, giants, prostitutes and dwarfs). In the 60's Arbus worked as a photojournalist and her work was featured in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Bazaar and Sunday Times magazines. Arbus experimented with the use of flashes in daylight, which allowed her to highlight and separate her subjects from the background. Her first public work was called "The Vertical Journey: Six Movements of a Moment Within the Heart of the City", which consisted of six portraits of New Yorkers. One of her most famous pieces of work is "Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park", which featured a scrawny boy holding a toy grenade in his left hand with a claw like gesture with a maniacal expression. The other, "Identical Twins" showed young twin sisters standing together in corduroy dresses, one smiling and the other frowning. Arbus' work has been criticized as being demeaning to her subjects, as it has a voyeuristic approach. However, admirers of her work were interviewed by the BBC and defended her work. Arbus then studied "conventional" people in an attempt to dispel this image.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1903. His aim, in his words, was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". He is best known for his work which documents the effects of the Great Depression. Like other photographers, Evans loosely supervised the making of prints and rarely spent time in the darkroom making them from his own negatives. Another well known piece of work is the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", which told of his stay with three white tenant families in Alabama, during the Great Depression. While Evans provided photographs of sharecroppers, James Agee, a writer, provided the words for the book, which was an account of rural poverty. T he individuals photographed became icons of the "Depression-era" (some of the descendants stated that "the family was presented in a falsely unflattering light by Evans' photographs"). It was also suggested that Evans may have been the inspiration for Andy Warhol's photo booth portraits. Evans experimented with photo booth self portraits himself in 1929. Many of Evans' work are kept as part of permanent collections in museums, and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Robert Frank

Robert frank was a photographer and film maker
He was noted for his photographic book the Americans which was a documentation of a foreigner views of American society in the the post war period.
Robert frank’s work was really interesting to look at because it shows American society in the late 1950’s ands gives a rare glimpse of what life was like in the post war period. His photos consist of journeys to parts of America unknown and many photos depict the lonely parts of America and the people and places he finds.

Nan Goldin

Nan goldin is an American fine art and documentary photographer who
Is best known for her photographic documentrys of gay and transsexual images
Her photographs are often of drug culture,aids,violence
Goldins work is mostly shown in slideshows and her shows can consist of 800 images that of mostly sexual nature.
The main themes of her early pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually shot with available light. She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public.Some critics have accused her of making heroin-use appear glamorous, and of pioneering a grunge style that later became popularized by youth fashion magazines such as The Face and I-D. However, in a 2002 interview with The Observer, Goldin herself called the use of "heroin chic" to sell clothes and perfumes "reprehensible and evil.

Sam Taylor Wood

White Cube Sam Taylor Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967 and has had numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997) and The Turner Prize (1998).
Taylor-Wood explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support.
In 2008, Taylor-Wood directed a short film Love You More, written by Patrick Marber and produced by Anthony Minghella. The film includes two songs by Buzzcocks and features a cameo appearance by the band's lead singer Pete Shelley. In February 2009, Sam Taylor-Wood, collaborating with Sky Arts chose to interpret Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci. She commented: "I’m really happy to be involved in such a great project. I think by capturing one of opera's most moving moments in a film short, we have put a modern spin on the aria.

mann ray

Man Ray was an American artist who was known for his avant garde photography and he was a significant contributor to both Dada and Surrealist movements. He spent most of his career in Paris and describes himself as a modernist. From time to time he began to attract attention until his death more than 60 years later. Man Ray never allowed the public to know about his early life and family background. Man Ray's father was a garment factory worker who also ran a tailoring business. May Ray's mother also enjoyed making family clothes from her own designs and using scraps of fabric. Man Ray's autistic abilities were first known in childhood. His time at Boy's High School provided him with grounding in drafting and otherbasic art techniques, however he educated himself with frequent visits to local art museums where he studied works of the Old Masters. Over the next four years he converted his room into a studio and worked towards being a professional painter while earning money as a commercial artist. Later in life he was forced to leave Paris due to the outbreak of the second World War. He lived in Los Angeles California from 1940 untill 1951. He met Juliet Browner, and they moved in together and married in 1946. He died in Paris on November 18th 1976.

White Cube Sam Taylor Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967 and has had numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1997) and The Turner Prize (1998). Solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Zurich (1997), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (1997) and so forth.

Taylor-Wood explored notions of weight and gravity in elegiac, poised photographs and films such as Ascension (2003) and a series of self-portraits (Self Portrait Suspended I - VIII) that depict the artist floating in mid air without the aid of any visible support.