Larry Sultan

http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/sultan_larry.php 

Larry Sultan was a contemporary photographer.  One of his more famous works was his book titled Pictures from Home. In this book his goal was to portray the "suburban daily lifestyle."  This photo is a portrait of his parents that he took in their home.  I couldn't find hardly any information on this picture but I think that he was trying to show the reality of suburban life and how although everyone acts like everything is picture perfect everyone has their own problems.  For example in this photo the two figures seem to be dressed nice and have a perfectly decent home but the husband is watching TV while the wife stands unnoticed in the corner with a pained expression on her face, showing that they could possibly be having marital issues.  I think that Sultan was interested in portraits because he could relate them to everyday life.  In his other portraits he tried to capture relationships, emotions, memories, and lifestyles and I think a really good way of portraying that is to photograph human subjects so that other people can relate to them.  I really enjoy this image. I think the composition is really effective, even though the woman is farther away she seems to be the main focus. I also like the concept of the photograph and I think he does a really good job of conveying it.

Assignment 2(0)

I chose Steve McCurry's portrait of a girl in Pakistan as my original photograph.  In his portraits he tries to catch actual emotion from the people instead of a posed picture.  In my recreation of the image I tried to capture the emotion in the girl's eyes.  In the original photo I get the feeling that the girl was smiling under her headdress so I tried to convey the same emotion of happiness that the girl had in the original photograph.

Assignment 1

In this photo I included most of the wire to show the chaos and confusion that I was trying to portray.  Using most of the subject shows the struggle that my roommates and I have been having in our apartment setting up cable and internet, it shows the length of the wire and how confusing it can be to work your way from one end to the other.  In this photograph I used a large aperture causing the foreground and the background to be fuzzy.  This aided in showing the depth of the subject and it's never-ending appearance.  I chose to make the wire fill the from from left to right to make it the main focus of the photo.  If I had expanded the frame on either side it would have shown the couch and the door, taking some of the concentration off of the subject.

In this photograph I chose to use back lighting to cause the subject to be darker than the light backdrop.  It helped make harsher shadows and highlights.  Where the hula hoop touches my arms it appears to be the same color causing myself and the hoop to look connected.  In this image the lines in the sheet that I used as a backdrop go in toward the subject and the hula hoop circles the subject, causing me to be the main focus of the photo.

In this photo I wanted to portray the word secret.  I had Johnny (the kid in front) block Erik's face to keep him hidden or "secret."  Their dark hair and shirt contrast with the white wall.  To make the scene more dramatic I would have made them darker to make it seem that there's a dark secret that they're telling each other but I wanted to make the mood light to show them telling secrets and more having fun than being serious.  The lines in this photograph are important.  There are a lot of diagonal lines-the door, arm rest, and the lines that the boy's arms create-that cause the photo to appear to have more motion to make it look like an action shot rather than being posed.

The original photograph gave a feeling of sorrow and felt kind of creepy.  For some reason when I think of something creepy clowns immediately pop into my head, so I recreated the image using four of my friends and painted them to look like clowns.  I chose to paint tear drops and a frown on the girl's face to reflect the depression in the original piece. Henry Peach Robinson was the photographer of the original image, after researching him and his work I found that a lot of his work is very dark and morbid.  In the original the girl laying down is dying of tuberculosis, hence the feeling of depression.