Milwaukee Art Museum July 10 - October 19, 2014
By Kylee Diedrich
Magnum Photos is a consortium of photographers who showcase their individual work as well as present group exhibitions/projects. Postcards from America is a large project spread among numerous cities, one of which was Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee Art Museum invited eleven photographers: Bruce Golden, Jim Goldberg, Susan Meiselas, Martin Parr, Paolo Pellegrin, Mark Power, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Jacob Aue Sobol, Alec Soth, Zoe Strauss and Donovan Wylie. They were directed to travel around Milwaukee between August 2013 - April 2014 documenting events, people and the city ranging from the State Fair, parades, city construction, urban decay, as well as workers and people who live or travel here. Each photographer used their interests to guide their photography, including color, composition and subject matter.
Two photographers I explored are Martin Parr and Mark Power. Both photographers have influence my own photography in how they look at the landscape and what they decide to photograph.
Parr photographs his interests and his process shows through the imagery.
Parr photographs his interests and his process shows through the imagery.
"Leisure, consumption and communication are the concepts that this British photographer has been researching for several decades now on his worldwide travels. In the process, he examines national characteristics and international phenomena to find out how valid they are as symbols that will help future generations to understand our cultural peculiarities. Parr enables us to see things that have seemed familiar to us in a completely new way. In this way he creates his own image of society, which allows us to combine an analysis of the visible signs of globalisation with unusual visual experiences. In his photos, Parr juxtaposes specific images with universal ones without resolving the contradictions. Individual characteristics are accepted and eccentricities are treasured." quote from Martin Parr's website.
Power's photographs deals more directly with death and destruction and the urban decay that is plaguing cities nation wide. In this project, Power pointed his camera to the decaying buildings scattered throughout the city of Milwaukee, revealing a somewhat post-apocalyptic world.
"To support himself Power tried a number jobs (he was an English teacher, a television actor and a fish farm attendant in Hong Kong; he painted cinema murals in Bangkok; produced large numbers of identical paintings for others to sell as their own in the Australian outback (very questionable, this one!) and ended up running the camera department of a large chemist in Bankstown, in the Western Suburbs of Sydney). While travelling Power began to realise he enjoyed using a camera more than a pencil and decided to 'become a photographer' on his return to England, two years later, in 1983." from Mark Power's website."
clarify structure of Magnum, for max professional, each artist should be love to their website.
ReplyDeleteI would expect plenty of analysis from you re: lessons they can teach you about photojournalism. I'm sorry there wasn't much info about the experience at MAM, but many assisted all the photographers and learned a lot. Would you want to help/shadow an artist in future, or stick with someone like Burtynsky?
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