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짜1,823.03 Volume 27 Issue 462 December 17, 2014
Contents
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CONTENTS
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Cover photo by twin brothers Mike and Doug Starn
Project Description
This magazine is a study of hierarchy, typographic organization, photography, dynamism, and grid use. These elements are featured throughout the pages of two feature stories, 16 pages, defining two different photographers and their work. The goal of the project was not only to become familiar with the photographers in the magazine but to also study the elements of page layouts and magazine compositions. Elements of a good cover page were explored with clear typographic hierarchy and striking photography. Inside spreads were composed with page numbers, headlines, subheadlines, quotes, photos, intro text, captions and body text. My goal for the magazine was to create layouts that highlighted
and emphasized the outstanding work of the two photographers. I constructed compelling pages that will encourage readers to look deeply into the beauty of the photos and read the biographies explaining the lives and works of the artists. I accomplished this goal by using elements of surprise to keep readers interested in the photos from page to page. One way that I did this was by placing large photos on pages preceding those with small photos. Another way of capturing the reader’s interest was through typographic hierarchy. Quotes, color and pull quotes were great additions to pages which will bring viewers to read the body text. The practice of learning how to design aesthetic magazine pages was very important in learning the use and purpose of a grid.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
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“We want to show the guts of photography, mainly because we love it so much. Each step in the process has its own beauty and limitless potential.� - Doug and Mike Starn
The Big BambĂş project represents connections between parts and whole. The giant sculptures are made of 30-34 foot bamboo poles and 70 miles of rope. This sculpture is located in Venice, Italy.
The Impermanence Of Beauty
By Kelly Reeve
Mike And Doug Starn “A series about what it is to be alive and grow and change. And being alive as a person, a society, a culture, a history a city.”
The art of twin brothers Mike and Doug Starn completely twists the norms of photography. The Starns create sculpture and painterly pieces made of distressed and worn photos or highly modified photos. Their high-art forms are displayed in museums all over the world and installed in public spaces. Their work is extremely conceptually based and most of it presents nature in association with themes of circulation and connection. They became internationally recognized for the style of their distressed photos in 1987. The photos explore topics of every day’s existence, perception, mortality, and decay.
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Revealed in these works are the notions of complexity, of layering, of the inconceivably voluminous architecture of things, of the external and internal universe.
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The Big Bambú sculpture is a living organism that reflects the connection between people’s childhood and adulthood. The piece is ever changing but always the same.
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The Attracted to Light Series attempts to explicate and delineate the human need for, and connection to light, metaphorically as well as physiologically.
By means of appropriation, fragmentation, and unorthodox presentation, the Starn’s works reveal earthly realities and the impermanence of beauty.
Mike and Doug Starn have been working collaboratively in photography since they were thirteen. In 1985, at the age of twenty-four, they first received critical attention for their torn, torqued, and intentionally distressed photographs. Their conceptual approach to photography made visible the normally invisible machinations of the photographer, challenging not only the nature of photography but also the nature of art. Scotch-taping together multitudes of faded, murky, torn wrinkled, and otherwise distressed photographic prints, they gave photography an astounding painterly and even sculptural physicality, opening the medium to a whole new world of expressive possibility. To this day they continue to defy categorization by effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as sculpture, painting, video, and installation. Fueled by their thoughtful investigations of art, philosophy, cognitive science and history, the Starns have produced a unique melding of metaphor and material. From the transformation of a delicate drying leaf into a digital sculpture, or a moth etched onto film by light, the Starns’ images thrum with the poetic tension between presence and absence, darkness and enlightenment. For nearly two decades Mike and Doug Starn have asked their audience to explore the divinity of everyday existence, perception,
mortality, and decay, to name a few of the themes embodied by their work. Over the years their subjects have included historical objects of art and religion as well as great works of art. By means of appropriation, fragmentation, and unorthodox presentation, the Starn’s works reveal earthly realities and the impermanence of beauty. They are steadfast in examining the corporeal and sensorial experiences that inform the process of seeing, adoring and worshiping, the interconnectedness of sensuality, decadence and physical beauty. Indeed, their choices of subjects— architectural and classical elements, Old Master paintings, fallen leaves, trees, moths, Buddhist statuary and snow crystals—build a visual lexicon with which to contemplate the passage of time. By infusing normally stable photographs with dynamism and dimensionality, they anticipate and embrace the accrual of meanings the artworks will experience over the years. The Starns recent works continue the thrust of their longtime fascination with the distinct dualism between light and darkness, nature and technology, past and present, part and whole. Absorption of Light was a concept devised by the Starns, informing five bodies of work including Black Pulse, Structure of Thought and Attracted to Light. These works underscore the Starns descent from heavenly to mortal spheres with photographs that attempt to explicate and delineate the human need for, and connection to light, metaphorically as well as physiologically. The photographs of Black Pulse comprise actual tree leaves, scanned and DOUG & MIKE STARN
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The series, alleverythingthatisyou, which captures snow crystals reveal a Buddhist influence, for it’s imperfection (and inherent impermanence) of their snowflakes
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“A series about what it is to be alive and grow and change. And being alive as a person, a society, a culture, a history a city.”
digitally skeletonized to depict desiccated shells of what the subjects once were. In both the Starns images of trees and leaves they isolate the skeleton of carbon that courses through their specimens, highlighting an intricate element of dark, traceable in every piece. The only part of the leaves that is left is the carbon make up. The veins in the leaves are related to the human body and represent the dualism between part and whole. As the Starns have described, trees are a recording of light turned into carbon through photosynthesis - the transformation of light into dark physical matter – an architecture of inky black darkness, growing towards the source. These starkly poetic silhouettes of intertwined branches, reminiscent of the veins and arteries of the human body, once again present the viewer with an expansive interpretation of meaning. Their first public commission was an installation called See it Split, See it Change. It is located in the subway station in Manhattan. The images on the walls and the sculpture structure are silhouettes of their tree images. The connections in the trees reflect the connections in the subway system. Arresting photographs of moths from the Attracted to Light series twist the hackneyed image of the creature into a monumental object of beauty and wonder, subtly alluding through their use of materials to the brittleness of the moth’s existence. These moths, emerging from the dark, delicate and fleeting creatures whose sole intent is to reach a source of light, offer us an insightful symbol reflective of our own condition. The Attracted to Light series involve distressed and imperfect images. The moth bodies are transformed into objects of beauty and wonder. These images are installed with scotch tape and push pins which is contradictory to the high art style. Many of the artworks are intimate in the process of showing the flaws of physical beauty. The Starns remain open to the abundant metaphors of the natural world – to the microcosm/macrocosm relationship of all things created. Revealed in these works are the notions of complexity, of layering, of the inconceivably voluminous architecture of things, of the external and internal universe. The Starn’s also photograph old art works to show the passage of time. The Starn brothers typically reinterpret traditional or famous images from art history, and incorporate them into their unique style of art. They dynamically enhance normal photos using toning and bleaching methods. The alterations on the images are forecasts of what will happen to them as time goes on.
The themes of nature, light, and impermanence run through many of the Starns’ works. Their series, alleverythingthatisyou, which captures snow crystals through photomicrographs, also reveals a Buddhist influence, for it’s imperfection (and inherent impermanence) of their snowflakes, with their ragged edges and missing parts, that makes them so remarkable and poignant. The Starn’s were influenced by the groundbreaking work of Wilson Bentley. Bentley, who lived in Jericho, Vermont, was the first person to photograph snowflakes. He captured over 5,000 images of crystals from his first photograph in 1885 until his death in 1931. It was Bentley who asserted in a scientific journal that no two snowflakes were alike, a concept that captured the public’s imagination both then and now. Bentley’s book Snow Crystals was published by McGraw/Hill in 1931 and is still in print today. One of the striking differences in the photographs of Bentley and the Starn brothers (besides color) is the brothers’ embrace of imperfection. Bentley called snowflakes little “masterpieces,” “tiny miracles of beauty,” and he had a particular obsession with “perfect” snowflakes. Bentley went so far as to alter his photographic negatives with a knife in order make his snowflakes more symmetrical. Bentley thought these retouched ice crystals were “truer to nature” than untouched ones (an idea that the German meteorologist Gustav Hellmann took serious issue with when he began his own study of snow). The Big Bambú project also represents connections between parts and whole. The giant sculptures are made of 30-34 foot bamboo poles and 70 miles of rope. The sculpture is a living organism that reflects the connection between people’s childhood and adulthood. The piece is ever changing but always the same. “A series about what it is to be alive and grow and change. And being alive as a person, a society, a culture, a history a city.” Mike and Doug Starn said. The Starn’s took thousands of photos of the project, which they hope to turn into its own exhibition. Mike and Doug Starn were born in New Jersey in 1961. In 1985 they graduated from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and only two years later were brought to international prominence by the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. Their art has since been the object of numerous survey solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. They received two National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1987, 1995), The International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Fine Art Photography (1992), and were artists in residency at NASA in the mid-nineties.
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“A thing you see in my pictures is that i was not afraid to fall in love with these people.� - Annie Leibovitz
Reflection
Annie Leibovitz By Kelly Reeve
Born in 1949 in Waterbury, Connecticut, Annie Leibovitz enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute intent on studying painting. It was not until she traveled to Japan with her mother the summer after her sophomore year that she discovered her interest in taking photographs. When she returned to San Francisco that fall, she began taking night classes in photography. Time spent on a kibbutz in Israel allowed her to hone her skills further.
Claire Danes and Damian Lewis pose in an interrogation room from the TV show, Homeland. Annie Leibovitz shot photos for an editorial featuring the high fashion spy.
In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatles graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.
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“My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds.” When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz followed suit. “In school, I wasn’t taught anything about lighting, and I was only taught black-and-white,” she told ARTnews in 1992. “So I had to learn color myself.” Among her subjects from that period are Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, shirtless and gritty. In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the two would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, and so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took one Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “and the three of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude and curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years. Annie Leibovitz: Photographs, the photographer’s first book, was published in 1983. The same year Leibovitz joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her wildly lit, staged, and provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Whoopi Goldberg submerged in a bath of milk and Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. (The cover showing Moore — which then-editor Tina Brown initially balked at running — was named second best cover from the past 40 years.) Since then Leibovitz has photographed celebrities ranging from Brad Pitt to Mikhail Baryshnikov. She’s shot Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton. She’s shot Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley nude, with Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights; and, recently, the world’s long-awaited first glimpse of Suri Cruise, along with parents Tom and Katie. Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board. A couple of years ago, seeking solace during what she describes as “financial difficulties that were distracting in the extreme,” Annie Leibovitz took time out from her professional assignments to embark on an evolving, open-ended photographic journey that led her from coast to coast and to England and back, exploring places that intrigued her and the vestiges of lives gone by—a project that gradually took shape as a book. From the dauntingly resilient American architecture of geysers, mountains, and waterfalls to the homes of a panoply of historical figures from Emerson to Elvis Presley, Leibovitz sinks her teeth into a sizable chunk of our cultural heritage, taking us ever deeper inside the experience. The view from the window of the greenhouse where Virginia Woolf wrote her novels, Thomas Jefferson’s vegetable garden at Monticello, an 20
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etching copied onto the walls of the Alcott family home in Massachusetts by May Alcott (the inspiration for Amy in Little Women) scale down our perception of these large personalities to intensely human dimensions and draw us into the intimate texture of their lives. And when Leibovitz focuses her lens even more tightly on objects—the chaise lounge, found upended in a closet, that Freud died on; Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress; the worn and broken pastels Georgia O’Keeffe worked with—the results are almost shockingly disarming. On her travels, as Leibovitz examined some of the early uses of photography and strove to recapture images past—for days she chased the clouds in Yosemite that Ansel Adams saw—she found history to be at times elusive and at others, startlingly present. “We try to hold on to things every which way we can, and there are a few things that remain and stay,” she observes. And her pilgrimage did its work, providing Leibovitz with a sense of reconnection. “It’s good to rethink and try to see what’s in front of you. It refreshed my eye.” On the future of photography, Leibovitz said “I think photography is stronger and better than ever before. Those of us who are photographers, the difference between us and everyone else is that we take what we do very seriously. There was a wonderful article in the New Republic that said photography came along long before there were cameras. We were always trying to capture the fleeting image. Photography came along long before we had the equipment. What is going to happen now is that we are the sensitive matter. You, the photographer, are the sensitive matter. What makes an impression on you is what will been seen. In this day and age of things moving so, so fast, we still long for things to stop, and we as a society love the still image. Every time there is some terrible or great moment, we remember the stills.” On the line between photojournalism and art she said “I personally made a decision many years ago that I wanted to crawl into portraiture because it had a lot of latitude. I realized I couldn’t be a journalist because I like to take a side, to have an opinion and a point a view; I liked to step across the imaginary boundary of the objective view that the journalist is supposed to have and be involved. It doesn’t mean we don’t need photojournalism. I think what happened to me is that I started to set up the covers of Rolling Stone magazine and I began to see more things set up and I saw there was a power in that. After that, I couldn’t go back to just journalism. But I still love the photo on the front page of the New York Times. It’s very, very important to me—I love to see how they use it, I love to see how they edit it. Those who want to be serious photographers, you’re really going to have to edit your work. You’re going to have to understand what you’re doing. You’re going to have to not just shoot, shoot, shoot. To stop and look at your work is the most important thing you can do.” On the famous photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Leibovitz said “As much as I’m not a journalist, I use journalism. And when you photograph a relationship, it’s quite wonderful to let something unfold in front of you. I love to take family pictures for that reason because there’s a dynamic. The hardest thing to do, actually, is a single person image because then it’s just me relating to that person. So with John and Yoko I sometimes
Left: The dramatic sea sprayed photo of Charlize Theron was published in a winter issue of Vogue. Right: Queen Elizabeth posed for Leibovitz in 2007 wearing her pale gold evening dress and holding her fur stole. Leibovitz asked her to take off her crown to look less dressy for this photo and another. Below: Nicole Kidman was featured in Vogue in September 2003.
“ You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than the truth.” ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
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Annie Leibovitz photographed Daniel Radcliffe for his dance moves in theater production, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, published in Vogue Magazine.
“The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.”
think that photograph was 10 years in the making. I’d met John Lennon when I photographed him in my twenties and had just begun working for Rolling Stone. Then, there we were in NYC in 1980. He’d just finished the album Double Fantasy, and I’d seen the cover, which was both of them kissing. I was so moved by that kiss. There was so much in that simple picture of a kiss. It wasn’t unusual to imagine them with their clothes off, because they did that all the time. But what happened was at the last minute was that Yoko didn’t want to take her clothes off. We went ahead with the shoot [and] ended up with this very striking picture. Of course, beyond all control, he was murdered that afternoon.” On the art versus science of being a photographer, Leibovitz stated, “I don’t think of myself as a very good technical photographer. I’m so sensitive. I’m very careful about who I let around me when I work because I feel everything that’s going on. I’m still learning about digital, the way we all are. In fact, some of the early work in the Disney campaign, I want to go back and redo now that the technology is better. If there’s any secret to the sauce here in terms of the art part of it, I think early on I just did what I wanted to do, and I have to make sure that I’m working with people who will let me do that. There are not too many people who will work with you like that. You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can’t. It’s important to stay the course. I don’t think I would have lasted this long if I’d listened to anyone. You have to listen somewhat and then put that to the side and know that what you do matters.” Leibovitz has produced a book without people, yet portraits are everywhere on its pages, and in them a profound sense of life’s bold fragility and art’s imperfect beauty. On a visit to Julia Margaret Cameron’s Isle of Wight home Leibovitz writes, “Cameron’s printing was inconsistent and parts of the pictures were soft, but they were never boring. There was something beautiful about not being in control all the time. Not being totally proficient. It was magic.”Among other honors, Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and toured internationally for six years. 24
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At the time she was only the second living portraitist — and the only woman — to be featured in an exhibition by the institution. Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” Leibovitz said in an interview with The New York Times late last year. Sontag told her, “You’re good, but you could be better.” Though the two kept separate apartments, their relationship lasted until Sontag’s death in late 2004. Sontag’s influence on Leibovitz was profound. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans, a trip that she admits she would not have taken without Sontag’s input. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on bloodsmeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume. Leibovitz’s most recent book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005, includes her trademark celebrity portraits. But it also features personal photographs from Leibovitz’s life: her parents, siblings, children, nieces and nephews, and Sontag. Leibovitz, who has called the collection “a memoir in photographs,” was spurred to assemble it by the deaths of Sontag and her father, only weeks apart. The book even includes photos of Leibovitz herself, like the one that shows her nude and eight months pregnant, à la Demi Moore. That picture was taken in 2001, shortly before Leibovitz gave birth to daughter Sarah. Daughters Susan and Samuelle, named in honor of Susan and Leibovitz’s father, were born to a surrogate in 2005. Leibovitz composed these personal photographs with materials that she used when she was first starting out in the ’70s: a 35-millimeter camera, black-and-white Tri X film. “I don’t have two lives,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.” Still, she told the Times, this book is the “most intimate, it tells the best story, and I care about it.”
A photo of Natalia Vodianova and P. Diddy by Leibovitz were featured in February 2010’s Vogue Magazine
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“The whole idea of how art’s been affecting people for centuries and what beauty can do to people - this is an incredibly rich area of human experience.” - Doug and Mike Starn
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Shutter Stop was published on December 17, 2014 by Jayhawk Ink at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. The work in this magazine was gathered and designed by Kelly Reeve. The essay about Doug and Mike Starn was compiled from three different websites including artnet.com, gwarlingo.com and tayloepiggottgallery.com. The Annie Leibovitz essay was compiled from three websites as well. One was an article written by Rae Ann Fera at fastcocreate.com, another from Rachel Somerstein at pbs.org, and another from britannica.com. Photos were all collected from different websites found through image searches on google.com. This magazine was designed with Adobe Caslon font as body text, captions and quotes, and Neutra Display Titling as headlines, sub-headlines, and by-lines. The layouts follow a strict grid for organizational purposes.
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