Sebastião Salgado
Mary Ellen Mark
We started off looking at a number of examples of slice of life feature pictures recording the peak action or reaction in day-to-day life as well as more serious pictures capturing moments from with high emotion of our humanity. The main idea was that candid photographs that show authentic real life moments far outshine the posed snapshots that we typically find in a family photo album. Being a fly on the wall and recording life unfolding can bring more storytelling and interesting pictures. In documentary photography, one of the biggest hurdles is gaining intimate access into a subjects life, and in photographing friends and family that obstacle is more than likely removed.
One of photography's great powers is that it transcends language and cultural barriers. By using capturing human emotions and our commonality through our day to day activities (eating, drinking, laughing, crying, working, playing, etc.) we can engage the viewers of our photography with more gripping pictures. We also discussed portraiture and how capturing real moments could be applied to making a better portrait.
Most of the photographers that we looked at this week have already appeared in past classes such as Steve McCurry, Mary Ellen Mark and Sebastião Salgado, but we also looked at Diane Arbus. Most of the feature photographs, however, were from a variety of American newspaper photographers that can be found here.