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I've really enjoyed reading Rexer's book and I think I'll continue to finish it during the summer. Every chapter I've read is intriguing and thoughtful. It questions me on my understanding of photography and has answered some of the questions I had, such as the "dichotomy" of form and emotional expression.  I was quite upset that we aren't able to use the darkroom this term. But I found taking pictures with digital camera is a different experience instead of a replacement of film camera. Film has its charm that every photo comes with a close connection with the photographer. Since it operates all manually and each frame is carefully token. Taking pictures with a film camera allows me to go back to the basics and really focus on the "taking" of a picture.  Corey Olsen, the artist I did my research on, is a lover of digital photography. Some of his works have the explicit characteristics of digital photos. They are very fine even on details and hav...

      Corey Olsen is a photographer from Maine and currently based in New York. He graduated from SVA in 2014 and was once a student of Lyle Lexer, the author of our textbook. After he graduated from SVA, he had his first solo show in Julia Saul Gallery featuring Garage Still Lifes series. Recently, he has been doing both personal work and commissioned work. His most well-known works are from Garage Still Lifes and City Island. (I want to show a few works of him before commenting) The swan picture from  City Island  appears in the last chapter where Rexer talks about social media and cliché. Olsen’s photos are perfect examples of “cliché”. Many of his works are described with words such as bland, ordinary by interviewers since they look like photos on postcards. In an interview, he said that “For me, a cliché is less of a dead end and more of a challenge; something to revive into a new life.” Looking deeper at his photos, there is a sense of humor in his work th...

Rexer talked about multiple purposes of street photography. When cam era and film were first invented, people are only able to shoot empty streets and architectures since it is impossible to capture the second of a moving person. Atget’s work is an example. When technology has developed, the focus started to shift from historical to social, and now artists have turned back to the looking itself.   The reason that I like street photography is human interaction, the power of it to show a place through a personal lens, and the contingency of it. You don’t know who you are going to meet and what interactions would you find or have with others. Going to other places is fun for shooting; however, even if one is shooting the same city, the photography can be variant. Like what Cole has shown, photography is a powerful tool to fight for equality and justice. It focuses on the vulnerable people in society who are usually ignored. The photos help them to get resonance in society. This work, ...

This chapter talks about landscape photography, but not only the kind of landscape photos we would think of. The writer takes the Yosemite park as an example. First, there are people like Adams who focuses on the spectacle of the mountains, and artists like Stephen Shore broke that rule and reaches out to take pictures with the landscape as a background for history and people, and also there are artists like Susan Derges who are “looking into a photograph” instead of “looking at”. It expanded my knowledge of landscape photography and provided me a wider view to look at a landscape photo. The question in the book that also bothers me a lot is why people still take pictures of landscape even though there are hundreds of better pictures. I always thought it is a feeling of possession, an emotion attached to the picture, and not comparable with other majestic pictures. But thinking about it now, the definition of landscape photography is actually very wide. It doesn’t have to refer to the ...

This chapter focuses on abstract photography. Rexer writes that “They have in common the motivation of questioning conventions of photographic imagery, practice structures of meaning…” Abstract photography’s purpose is not on documenting objects, although this is what usually related to photography. The object could not be the topic, not there could be no object at all, like Ellen Carey’s work. To me, those artists pay more attention to formal aspects, idea, or technology/chemical. The images are usually beyond our perception of photography. “If the nineteenth century was haunted by the idea of invisible forces as a fact behind reality, the twenty-first is haunted by the notion that the unseen actually controls the visible.” This sentence reminds of the idea in Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. He is trying to tell us that what we are seeing and believing to be the reality is only the surface that is available to us. Just like Einstein first discovered the special relativity, it extends...

Not Hungry Picnic Girl Check out my photos on Flicker→ Not Hungry Picnic Girl                     In this project, I toke all the photos by iPhone 8. Echoing the mass photo discussed in the last chapter of Rexer's book, I decided to do a challenge with taking pictures with my phone.  The idea is also inspired by a film called Tangerine , which is completely filmed by an iPhone (even older version than mine). I was surprised and very interested by the idea when I first heard about it. It challenges the current notion in film industry or even photography that in order to make a good work, a good equipment is essential. And while watching this film, I didn't notice any severe decrement in image quality. The film does not look like a phone made film if not told so. But, there do have some shortcomings, such as a lack in dynamic range. To overcome these technical deficiencies on my phone, I decided to build a strong tone to cover th...