Unit 4: Blog Entry

Unit 4: Blog Entry

1. Minor White

White was born in Minnesota, and began his art career in 1937 when he began photographing landscapes in Oregon. His style mimicked Ansel Adams' in the way his photography was both symbolic yet simple. In 1946, Ansel Adams offered White a teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. He continued exploring "equivalency", where an image serves as an idea or emotional state beyond the subject pictured. Near the end of his career, while serving as professor of creative photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he produced his most powerful piece, Essence of Boat, depicting a broken boat half covered in snow, symbolizing the end of his life and career. 

2. Cindy Sherman

Sherman was born in Glenn Ridge New Jersey in 1954, but did not show an interest in photography or the arts until she was exposed to it in college. After studying photography at Buffalo State University, Sherman and several other artists formed Hallwalls, an independent artists' space where she and fellow artists exhibited. Sherman is known for her self portraits, that place her in the role of other women at the time and comment of social justice issues. her most famous photographs of this type are the United Film Stills. Her work transformed in the mid 1980's, shown in the Disaster and Fairytale series; which for the first time, did not show herself as the subject. She is currently living and working in New York city. 

3. Man Ray


Ray was born in 1890, and grew up in Brooklyn as a Jewish immigrant from Russia. His early influences were Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Henri, who helped him grasp the early concepts of art.
After exploring Dadaism, which challenged existing notions of art and literature, and encouraged
spontaneity, Ray moved to Paris where he created some of his most famous portraits of the artistically and literarily elite. Endlessly versatile,  Ray also experimented with fashion photography during his years in Paris. In his later career, he continued to display his work all around the world and died in 1976.



4. Jerry Uelsmann 

Uselmann was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1934. Throughout his career, his photography has had surreal and mystical themes that contain deeper meanings and have an eerie theme. Despite the impossible scenes he creates with his photos, he does not use photoshop; and instead layers his photos in the darkroom, using up to 7 or 8 layers when a photo is completed. He is an accomplished photographer and has received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He has thought at the University of Florida since the 1960's and currently lives with his wife, Maggie Taylor in Florida.