Jenny Thomas/ Artist Statement

Through out my journey in beginning media arts, I have learned and assessed many skills. During the whole semester, we’ve focused on four different topics: Homage Paid to a Chosen Photographer, Retro/Vintage, Typography and we focused and used Annie Leibovitz as inspiration for some of our photos. For my homage photography, I chose to focus on Mr. Robert Adams. The way that I took photos was just by examining his photos. I've looked at a bunch of his photography that I found online and I found that by looking at his pictures, it helped me to get an idea of what I should look for when I went on photo-shoots. For example- he consistently took pictures of withering trees or trees, so I tried to get pictures with trees. Another example is houses or buildings- they were simple to find, but I shot them at an angle for which created depth in the picture, just like Mr. Adams did with his photographs.
He also de-saturated the photos and seemed to “up” the contrast to create further depth in his photography. He noted that the “whiteness” in his black and white pictures created more depth. When we focused on our Vintage/Retro section, we began to work with Adobe Photoshop a bit more. We learned how to work in layers and to take things slowly and to pay attention to every detail to get the best possible photography. We tried to create the illusion that something in a picture is real by cutting out a specific object or person from a different picture. For this, we also still paid homage to our photographers by cutting something of their pictures into ours, or vice-versa. In Adobe Photoshop, I used the eraser tool and cut out something from his photo and blurred the edges of it (using the blur tool) so it wouldn't look all choppy and seem as though it was cut out with scissors. Next, I selected the object I cut out, copied it, opened a new layer with the picture I wanted to use, and then pasted it. I clicked on edit, transform and then scale so I could make it bigger or small. The last few things I did were making it the right saturation/hue I wanted, the right brightness and contrast, adding noise to the picture, etc. When we focused on our Typography unit, we had the option of using lines from poems that Louis Jenkins or Connie Wanek wrote. I split my pictures into half and half, so all of my pictures equally consisted of those two poets. In this, we had to take pictures that matched what the poem was talking about, or a line that we chose. A lot of my photos consisted of winter because I chose a lot of lines that had to do with winter, plus I love the enchanting beauty that the winter season brings to us. I mainly focused on the sharpening tool, and upping the contrast. The font I usually used was called Quilted Butterfly. A lot of my photos in this unit consisted of the color purple because it is my favorite color. This typography unit was my favorite unit because this was a unit that I really put my full effort into. I don’t think I worked as hard on the other units as I did for this one. Our last unit focused on taking pictures from Annie Leibovitz as our inspiration. My model was my sister for this unit, and I focused on portraying people as Annie Leibovitz did. I did not edit my photos a lot for this one, because Annie liked to keep her pictures as original as possible. I only changed the contrast or brightness, but not so much where there’s a huge difference from the original picture. I liked Annie Leibovitz’ style because she had the ability to make simple things look so amazing.

Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz is a very well known photographer in America because she worked with The Rolling Stone magazine for a long time, then made a dramatic change to photograph the Vanity Fair magazine. She was born on October 2nd, 1949 in Westbury, Connecticut and along her were five other kids. Her mother's name was Marilyn Leibovitz and she was a modern dance instructor, and her father's name was Sam, who was an Air Force lieutenant. Her career did not start as a photographer, but instead as a painter at the San Francisco Art Institute; but there was where she found her love for photography.

In 1970 (she was 23 at the time), she applied for a job with Rolling Stone magazine and the editor hired her and gave her the position of staff photographer. Within two years, Annie moved up and withheld the title Cheif Photographer for the magazine, and she would continue to hold onto that title for the next ten years. Working with Rolling Stone, she developed her unique use of bold colors in her photography, and people have said that the photographs they used for the Rolling Stones have become collector's items, "most notably an issue that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz’s photo of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death."

In 1983, Annie left Rolling Stones and began to work with Vanity Fair. "To date, a number of Vanity Fair covers have featured Leibovitz’s stunning—and often controversial—portraits of celebrities. Demi Moore (very pregnant and very nude) and Whoopi Goldberg (half-submerged in a bathtub of milk) are among the most remembered actresses to grace the cover in recent years."

Here are some of Annie Lebovitz' breathtaking work:

Typography

In my photography class, we had to base all of our pictures on two people: Connie Wanek and Louis Jenkins. I did a couple pictures on Connie Wanek, but I mostly did my pictures based off Louis Jenkins' winter prose poems. I am in love with the winter wonderland that December and all of the winter months bring, and I love taking pictures of the magical snow flurries that fall from the sky. The font that I used mostly was called Quilted Butterfly. I upped the contrast on a lot of my photos and used the sharpness effect. A lot of my photos also consisted of the color purple, because it is my favorite color.

The poem I chose to do by Louis Jenkins was called First Snow, and I chose to take the line, "Coffee and silence, morning sunlight" and put it on this photograph because it really does fit this picture. I took this picture before school when it was foggy across the HP field and the sunlight just hits the lenses really well. I used cool colors to match up with the darkness of dawn and the warmer colors to match up with the morning sunlight.

Helvetica

The movie Helvetica was about the font Helvetica, obviously. People that talked about it were called typographers (I never knew there was such a thing until I saw the movie.) The movie really made me realize that the font Helvetica IS really everywhere. Schools, on signs on the streets, on store windows at the mall, in your house, on your computer, just everywhere. From the movie, they said corporate businesses use it as well- but why do they? Is it because Helvetica is cheap to use? Why isn't anyone taking the time to do something new-instead of being cliche all the time? People over time have begun to believe that using Helvetica is formal- it makes pictures, signs, etc look more clean cut...and I do think that's true because it makes everything readable. The font I am using to type this blog is HELVETICA. Helvetica also makes things look boring, so why are people so interested in using Helvetica? I think people just don't want to take the time to be creative and use their imagination to make something more interesting.

Vintage Through My Eyes

These photos are a glimpse at what we are doing in Beg. Media Arts. Right now, we are working on developing Adobe Photoshop skills. We've been learning to work in layers and we're trying to create the illusion that something in a picture is real by cutting out a specific object or person from a different picture. We are also still working on paying homage to our photographer; My photographer is Robert Adams. In Adobe Photoshop, I used the eraser tool and cut out something from his photo and blurred the edges of it (using the blur tool) so it wouldn't look all choppy and like it was cut out with scissors. Next, I selected the object I cut out, copied it, opened a new layer with the picture I wanted to use, and then pasted it. I clicked on edit, transform and then scale so I could make it bigger or small. The last few things I did were making it the right saturation/hue I wanted, the right brightness and contrast, adding noise to the picture, etc. In this slideshow, I only did two pictures because I like to take longer and spend more time on a picture then doing it in a hurry. The rest are just some regular pictures I took and thought were the best to share with you.

Homage to Mr. Robert Adams

 The way that I am taking photos is just by examining his photos. I've looked at a bunch of his photography that I found online and I found that by looking at his pictures, it's helped me to get an idea of what I should look for when I went on photo-shoots. For example- he consistently took pictures of withering trees or trees, so I tried to get pictures with trees. Another example is houses or buildings- they were simple to find, but I shot them at an angle for which is created depth in the picture- like he did with his photographs.
For my project on Paying Homage to my chosen photographer, I focused on five pictures of Robert's that were most interesting to me.

Robert Adam's photo #1

Homage photo #1

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Homage #2

Robert Adam's photo #2

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Robert Adam's photo #3

Homage photo #3

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Robert Adam's photo #4

Homage photo #4

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Homage photo #5

                                         

Robert Adam's photo #5