JACK YANG - Style Writing

Ori Gersht, was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1967. In most of his work, he tried to explore how the technologies could enhance the ways we perceive the world and history. In his work, the object or the landscape usually undertake some catastrophic events, for example, he took pictures at sites with historic tragedies such as Auschwitz, Ukraine, Hiroshima, and Bosnia. Therefore, his landscape usually shows a sense of solemn and lonely. The color is unsaturated, and the light is dimmed, barely no signs of human activities, only a vast scene of the landscape itself. By talking these pictures, Gersht could remind people the trauma that once happened to this land, and remind people to not mess up again, because the price for those mistakes could be high, and it’s the people who has to endure the sorrowful result. Nonetheless is his series about still objects, including one of his most renowned series about exploding flowers. Gersht used very high shutter speed to capture the scene of explosion. In the frame, the flowers bursted into pieces, and the moment was captured. In the particular moment, an event as fierce as an explosion was turn into a stilled scene, so peaceful and graceful just as the landscape he took. I really love how Gersht could turn something fast and fierce into a single moment without lost its aesthetic, and moreover, the color of the flowers also got burst into every Conor of the frame, which brought the photograph a sense of classical drawing, with many small color blocks. 

Nobuyoshi Araki, is one of the most successful Japanese photography all time; his works usually contain nude and sexual implication, which was often criticize by people, however, this was deeply connect to his early life, and the death of his wife Yoko. Growing up near cemetery and brothel, Araki’s life was deeply influence and attract to sex and the “beauty” of sex. In most of his works, you see naked women, tied with a traditional Japanese technique called kinbaku-bi, moreover, some of the pictures were focus on their sex organs. He claimed that photography is sex, and camera is his sex organ, and he is really proud of that as he said in a interview :““I free their souls by tying up their bodies.” Sounds like nonsense, huh? Up until recently I used to say, “I don’t tie up their souls, only their bodies.” But now I say the opposite because I asked this girl which is better and she said that she liked the idea of “freeing the soul” more. So I stuck with it.” For him, he tries to show the beauty of sex and other related to that, even when he is photographing flower because to him, he sees flower as the sex organ of a plant, therefore he uses the way he photograph women. According to Araki, he does not consider this as erotic or explicit, but a pure beauty that he want to capture and share with the world. In Susan Sontag’s On Photography, she talked about the aggression of photography, however, in Araki’s work, we does not see his aggression since he also put himself into the work, as part of it, this kind of passion and love eventually made him one of the greatest photographer alive.

Linda Foard Roberts is a contemporary photographer from North Carolina, USA. Her works are mainly focus on landscape, portrait, and stills. Surprisingly, even though she is a contemporary one, she still decides to use 4x5”, 5x7”, and 8x10” to take pictures, therefore the photograph we see has a sense of nostalgia. Her subject could be vary in very different ways, there is corpse of birds, sands, books, and people. Due to the equipment she used, we can see a very distinct style of color, for example, the white is actually “yellow-ish” when it appears in the photo, also since the lense she use is some old one, therefore we can see some special bokeh that is not so familiar. In Robert’s photo, we can see that time has frozen in her frame, like they are from decades ago, she has her distinct retro style that it makes people feel calm and peaceful. She tries to capture the moments that’s valuable throughout the time, those inevitable one, as if she is trying to use her camera to capture memories, by taking picture to those imperfect moments of life. Also, here picture may not only have one layer, there are examples of her photograph that she actually used double exposure on one single film or plates to create a dreamy and poetic moment to carryout some deeper meaning other than the content itself. I really like how she wrongly focus the picture in order to carry out a deeper meaning, which means a lot not only just as photography, but a broader reign of art.