Robert Mapplethorpe
Self Portrait, 1980

Robert Mapplethorpe (November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men. The frankhomoeroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks.

Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites.

Mapplethorpe worked primarily in the studio, particularly toward the end of his career. Common subjects include flowers, especially orchids and calla lilies, and celebrities, including Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry, Richard Gere, Peter Gabriel, Grace Jones, and Patti Smith. Smith was a longtime roommate of Mapplethorpe and a frequent subject in his photography, including a stark, iconic photograph that appears on the cover of Smith's first album, Horses. Also, a Patti Smith portrait from 1986 recalls Albrecht Dürer's 1500 self-portrait.

In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Pratt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages, including images cut from books and magazines. He acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970 and began producing his own photographs to incorporate into the collages, saying he felt "it was more honest." That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel.

Los Angeles, 

October 21, 2012 - March 24, 2013
Lily, 1977

Hi guys
I have started a new blog here: http://liliphotography2.blogspot.co.uk/
 Feel free to follow me on my new blog if you like!

William Eggleston

William Eggleston (born July 27, 1939), is an American photographer. He is widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography as a legitimate artistic medium to display in art galleries.

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Sumner, Mississippi.

drawing, and working with electronics. From an early age, he was also drawn to visual media, and reportedly enjoyed buying postcards and cutting out pictures from magazines.

Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's book

. Eggleston later recalled that the book was "the first serious book I found, from many awful books...I didn't understand it a bit, and then it sank in, and I realized, my God, this is a great one.”

 First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966 after being introduced to the medium by William Christenberry. Color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later 1960s. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists. In an interview, John Szarkowski of New York'sMuseum of Modern Art (MoMA) describes his first, 1969 encounter with the young Eggleston as being "absolutely out of the blue". After reviewing Eggleston's work (which he recalled as a suitcase full of "drugstore" color prints) Szarkowski prevailed upon the Photography Committee of MoMA to buy one of Eggleston's photographs.

Around the time of his 1976 MoMA exhibition, Eggleston was introduced to Viva, the Andy Warhol "superstar", with whom he began a long relationship. During this period Eggleston became familiar with Andy Warhol's circle, a connection that may have helped foster Eggleston's idea of the "democratic camera", Mark Holborn suggests. Also in the 1970s Eggleston experimented with video, producing several hours of roughly edited footage Eggleston calls Stranded in Canton. Writer Richard Woodward, who has viewed the footage, likens it to a "demented home movie", 

Eggleston also worked with filmmakers, photographing the set of John Huston's film Annie (1982) and documenting the making of David Byrne's film True Stories (1986). He is the subject of Michael Almereyda's recent documentary portrait William Eggleston in the Real World (2005).

He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003.

In 2012, three dozen of Eggleston's larger-format prints – 40 by 66 inches instead of the original format of 16 by 20 inches – sold for $5.9 million in an auction at Christie’s to benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the artist’s work. New York art collector Jonathan Sobel subsequently filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Eggleston, alleging that the artist's decision to print and sell oversized versions of some of his famous images in an auction has diluted the rarity—and therefore the resale value—of the originals.

Untitled (St. Simons Island, Georgia), 1978 from Morals of Vision, 1978

Untitled, 1975-Dye transfer print16 x 20 (40.6 x 50.8)

Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003

Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003

 Myths and Hatreds

http://www.egglestontrust.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston

Cheim & Read - William Eggleston

• A biography of the artist William Eggleston from the J. Paul Getty Museum

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.egglestontrust.com/images/portfolios/los_alamos_s.jpg&imgrefurl

Reflection Photography

Naoya Hatakeyama

 

Hatakeyama was born in Iwate, Japan in 1958. He graduated from the University of Tsukuba, School of Art and Design in 1981 and completed postgraduate studies at the University of Tsukuba in 1984. , lives and works in Tokyo

Awards

§  1997: 22nd Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award^[2]

§  2000: 16th Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Prize^[2]

§  2001: 42nd Mainichi Award of Art^[2]

§  2003: Photographer of the Year Award from the Photographic Society of Japan^[2]

Naoya Hatakeyama: River Series / Shadow, 2002 

Naoya Hatakeyama: River Series, 1993-94 Gallery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoya_Hatakeyama

http://www.lagalerie.de/hatakeyama.html

I just ran out of space on my blogger..!!!!!!!!
What, no more photos for me? Apparently I must start to buy space monthly to put my photographs up. Has anyone else received this message? 

"Whoops! You're out of space. You are currently using 100% of your 1 GB quota for photos. Upgrade storage
Photos are stored in your Picasa Web Albums account and are included in your 1 GB free quota for photos. Additional storage you purchase is shared between several Google products and is in addition to your free quota. 
does anybody know what can i do?

Window shop models

I tried to take a few shots of window's displays.

there were some life-size mannequins models in the window.

However, I had some trouble with reflections of passers-bys, cars on the other side of the road.

But I tried to combine the reflections with the models to achieve a new meaning of mannequins photography.

It was such an interesting experience.