The human artist book at the MFA was really inspiring. I liked many of the images for being equally creative and inventive. They used the human body in a way that I’ve rarely seen before. Their still photographs describe their feelings or complex ideas.
I liked Erwin Blumenfeld’s pointallist style. The subject and the background were both tied together by their rendering and separated by their form. Daido Moriyama used the same idea with the photograph of the fishnets on the woman’s legs. The simple bend of the pattern shows the shape of her body. Bill Brandt’s photograph of the woman’s legs crossed with the room behind her struck me because it seemed to be from the point of view of the woman. He used a special lens to distort the image which essentially made it much more interesting.
A very inventive photo that I saw was Faces by Peter Keetman. I’m not positive that this photograph wasn’t altered because it doesn’t seem like something that is possible to photograph, but it must be because then it would be labeled ‘multi-media’ or something. There is a man’s face out of focus with a screen in front of him. Part of the screen is wet and every square section of the screen containing water has a little version of the same face in it. Incredible if it was a one-shot photograph.
Another image that was equally striking to me was Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s Narragansett. It is so beautiful, I wish I took it. The foreground is a dock, the middle ground is a man upside-down with his mouth open as if he were screaming, and the background is the ocean. I have no idea what the meaning behind the image is, but it doesn’t matter to me because it is such a successful black and white image.
Lee Friedlander’s Self-Portrait is really amazing. At first glance it appears to be a photograph altered in Photoshop with multiple translucent layers on top of one another. He had taken a photograph with his feet at the bottom of the frame with the sun behind him so he would cast a shadow over the chair in front of him. The photograph holds the viewer’s attention and takes a little figuring out but is a masterpiece in that sense. It’s very visually pleasing the way that the design on the chair really stands out in the darkness of his shadow.
The last photograph that really stuck out in my mind was the photograph of Matthew Pillsbury’s friend in a dark room playing a gameboy. Matthew made his friend appear ghostly by prolonged exposure of the film. The gameboy light is an accent that mimics the lights of the city at night viewed out the window of the room he is in. Both of these strategies make his photograph extremely successful.
The human body is used in completely different contexts in each of these pieces. Each one is successful in its own way. The collection of images works as a whole for this reason. I can see why having a non-narrative sequential book can be much more powerful than a book with a straightforward story.
