Liam Drury's ART 240 Blog

       John Dugdale is an American photographer who deals mostly in cyanotype processes. Dugdale's images are very much so unlike your standard cyanotype where you see the shape of a flower or an object on a blue sheet of paper. Dugdale's images have absolutely stunning contrast, and are made using what seems like massive negatives. One things that intrigues me is how he actually goes about exposing the images. Does he use something like a projector? Or does he expose them to the suns with negatives as big as the paper? Most of his images are self portraits, many of which were taken while Dugdale was losing his sight due to complications with a stroke and an HIV related Illness.       Dugdale's works often involved a sense of suffering, or a theme of death. I think the reason the Cyanotype attracted Dugdale so much was due to it's somewhat hazy nature, and the fact that the images were blue. It was very easy to make sad images for Dugdale, express...

 Phillipe Halsman was an American Photographer. He was well known for his portrait work with many well known artists, famous thinkers, and popular figures at the time. Most of his portraits brought out the sillier and more whimsical side of his subjects for the most part, really making his images stand out amongst the many others of the same people. Halsman always knew how to pose and portray, regardless of his subject. Just looking at the image could tell you what kind of person you were looking at. This first image is a portrait of Jean Cocteau, a French poet. Upon looking, there is a sense of confusion as Cocteau is portrayed with multiple arms, carrying a pen, a book, a cigarette, a pair of scissors, a paint brush, and an empty hand at his side. There's a reason Halsman gives him all of these things, as well as all of these arms. It says something about how busy or crazy of a life Cocteau has, maybe it represents the little bit of free time he has, or it shows that he's so ...

 Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese Photographer who works primarily in black and white/analog photography. He is most well known for his long exposures in movie theatres, as well as his series "Seascapes." Today I will be focusing more on his work from Seascapes, and his self portraits as I've already covered Sugimoto's long exposure theatre work a while ago. This first image by Sugimoto relates to his work in the theatres with long exposure. He looks to have made himself a viewer, captivated by whatever is going on on the screen. Sugimoto's use of heavy reflection makes me feel like he is interpreting himself as a character from his long exposure works. Capturing a proper negative for this image must have been rather difficult, as well as making a good print for it too. I'm curious how much of this image was due to how the negative was created, and how much of it is heavy darkroom work. Most of the image is very underexposed besides his face, clearly doing what ...