Laura Bosak Photographer Styles

Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld was born in New York City on June 30, 1944. He is mostly known for his influence on color photography during its early stages. Most of his photography documents ordinary people and places in America during their everyday life. It is an art form that some people might not even consider “photography” because it just shows people’s lives or places on a day-to-day basis that people wouldn’t normally consider beautiful enough to look at as “art.” Joel began his color photography in the 1970s and mostly worked on street photography. He used an eight-by-ten-inch camera which enabled him to achieve crisp details in his work. I was mostly attracted to the photography in his book, Oxbow Archive. These photographs contain landscapes of farmland and forests, mostly during the winter time when everything is dead. They are just “everyday” landscapes that normal people would not normally find exciting to look at. Each photograph is crisp and clean and is photographed at a wide angle to make the viewer feel like they are actually there. The photographs looked like he just went on nature walks everyday and just photographed what he saw and whatever he found interesting.

Bing Wright

Bing Wright was born in 1958 in Seattle, Washington. He received his BA in Art History from Columbia University. Wright photographs all kinds of things from dead flies, to windows, to broken glass. He exclusively worked in black and white until he recently introduced some color into his work. Most of his work uses a simple seamless grey/white background while placing his subject somewhere in the middle or off to the side using the rule of thirds. In his “Greyscapes,” he would place the landscape very close to the bottom of the photograph in a vertical orientation. By doing this, he “breaks” the rules about landscape photography. He makes it so the sky is just pure grey and blank and everything that is going on is at the bottom. I am mostly drawn to some of his more recent work, called “Broken Mirror/Evening Sky.” Here, he takes a broken, cracked mirror and places it in front of the camera and photographs a sunset/sky in the broken mirror. The broken mirror provides some texture and adds some more interesting details to the picture rather than it being just a plain, simple photograph of a sunset.

Matthew Brandt

Matthew Brandt was born in 1982 in Los Angeles. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cooper Union in 2004, and then his Masters of Fine Arts from UCLA in 2008. Matthew is mostly known for his photographs from his project called, “Lakes and Reservoirs.” These photographs are much more than just your average picture of a lake, and I found the process of producing these images quite interesting. Brandt uses a process called C-printing, or Chromogenic color printing. This process of printing is a wet chemical process that was introduced by Kodak in 1942. While Brandt was working on this project, he would have to travel to a lake or reservoir with a camera and a few empty jugs. When he reached the lake, he would snap a few photographs of it and then collect water from the lake. Once he returned from the trip to the lake, he would make chromogenic prints and then let them soak in the lake’s water. Each lake’s water was different and some water would break down the layers in the image in as little as a few days to as long as a few months. Once the image has been made, it is like the lake is representing itself in the photograph.