Emily Gilmore- Eitan Vitkon

I was pretty impressed by Eitan Vitkon's photographic exhibition, "Thorns" in the Emmanual Fremin Gallery. His use of dramatic lighting and curiously textured subject matter lured me in, and then I fell in love with his creation process. He selects images and projects them on to bundles of thorns, and then he reshapes the thorn piles to mimic the forms of the selected images and photographs the result. 

Vitkon is an Israeli contemporary photographer who was born in 1967 in a small village in southern Israel. He began his career in art with an interest in landscape, so he studied architecture at Pratt Institute in New York. Eventually, he found more creative gratification from photography, but his attention to form, like in landscape architecture, is evident in his photographic work and processes.

According to an interview with Vitkon, thorns are a symbol of Israel. His photographs of the projections and thorns the surrealist materialization of his feelings towards his native country and the culture and people that inhabit it.

Eitan Vitkon: 

"We Israelis are thorns: warm, but also hard and very direct and prickly; sometimes, we can even come off as rude. Americans can be very polite but you can’t always be sure if they say what they mean. We Israelis don’t have that mechanism: we say it as we see it. That’s not always pleasant. Traditionally, our national plant is the Sabra- a fruit that’s very sweet but covered with thorns. After 60 years of living under difficult conditions in this country, the sweetness is gone and we’re left with the thorns."

http://www.americanphotomag.com/photo-gallery/2014/04/interview-eitan-vitkons-thorns

Binh Nguyen - Marianna Rothen

M A R I A N N A  R O T H E N

Marianna Rothen is a fairly young photographer who was born in Canada in 1982and is currently residing in NYC. Having first started as a model at the age of 15, she spent several years traveling and documenting her experiences through her photography.  Her work could be described to be “ethereal and hauntingly sexy”.

  

Rothen is only thirty-two but her work are inspired by the sixties and early seventies and European cinema that came along with those decades. Although she is a young photographer and film photography is easily accessible, she chose to work with a mix of tradition photographic processes in addition to the digital process; unfortunately, it seems as if though some film stocks are becoming scarce and expensive so this might affect her creative process.

Her work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Syndey, Cologne, Istanbul, and other major cities. Her latest show is called Pheromones Hotbox located in Chelsea, New York; a collaboration with four other female artists.

      

Portfolio // Interview

Kelly Mullin - Yuji Hamada

Yuji Hamada

Hamada is a 36 year old photographer who started his career taking pictures when he was 18. He was born in Osaka, Japan and currently resides in Tokyo. He graduated from Department of photography, College of Art, Nihon University in 2003. Two years after the graduation he belonged to Japanese fashion publishing company, INFAS Publications as a photographer and studio assistant. Yuji became a freelance photographer in 2006.

Yuji has created a single photo book which is simply called "Photograph". It contains a series of photographs based on rays of light breaking in to different scenes found in a normal day. Light and shadow seem to play a huge role within all of his photographic work. Most of his work portrays every day things that occur but seen from a different point of view and offers us a frozen moment of a beautiful part of each day.

"One day in 2005, I saw a girl in the park. It was almost evening, and she seemed mesmerized by a patch of sunlight resting on her palm. She asked me, “Where did this light come from, and how?” I mulled over the question; the light had been emitted by the sun, before traveling an astronomical distance to reach that very place, but I refrained from telling her so. She seemed to be looking for a different kind of answer."

His book is worth $500 on Amazon. None of these photos are framed in any certain way and there is no captioning to each within the book. The photographs are left to ones imagination to figure out. On each page the picture takes up the entire page which allows you to see detail within each photograph. 

I chose to pick this specific artist as my favorite because I think it connects most to me. His photos contain a specific placement of light and composition. This type of photographic is something I'm drawn too because I try to use light as much as I can within my photographs. Light makes a photographic something look at and makes it beautiful. For me if the light is wrong so is the photograph. Landscape is also something I'm particularly fascinated with so that also drew me in. These aren't beautiful landscapes either. These are landscapes he made beautiful by use of the light.