Waste Land Review

Lamont Bowman

3/18/14

Prof Mathews

Photography IV

                                                                 Movie Review: Waste Land
       Waste Land directed by Lucy Walker and co-directed by João Jardim and Karen Harley, features renowned artist Vik Muniz journeys from his home in Brooklyn to his Brazil and to the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs the self-designated pickers of the recyclable materials called “catadores”.

     When we throw out our garbage, we think it goes to some facility where some machines burn the undesirables while it recycles the reusable items such as bottles and cans. But in fact it goes to landfill sites like Jardim Granacho, where Tião and 3,000 other people titled “catadores” sort out each and every piece of garbage they find to be sold to commercial recycling companies. And while the group is paid for their work, it isn’t enough to help them nor their families as some are willing to eat the unfinished food from the landfills. As Vik and his crew work on their own project called “Pictures of Garbage” where he recreates classical paintings using garbage, he starts to become more attached to the workers as he starts to explore their lives. One moment that struck me was when a woman named Suelem Pereira Dias finds a dead baby in one of the piles and says that she immediately thought about her own kids. It struck me as a surreal moment; maybe one or twice you would hear stories about someone abandoning their child in a dumpster but here was a woman retelling those events and how she felt at the moment.

   

As Vik finishes his project, he invites Tião to an auction in London where he sells one of the prints titled “Marat (Sebastião)” which sells for $50,000 and causes Tião to weep uncontrollably. The other prints are featured at an exhibition in Rio, which overwhelms the group as they see themselves in a different light. The movie ends with a very positive light as it tells the viewer what happens to Vik and the catadores. The prints from Vik’s project ends up making $250,000 which helped Tião open up learning center and bring in more equipment for their group. Other members like Zumbi or Irma where able to realize their dreams with the money they have received.

   This movie was not a biography of the artist, but a look at the artist in the context of the community in which his art is created and how did it affect them. It will move you to tears as you truly feel for these people who only seek to better their community and themselves and will cause you to re-think certain aspects of your life. It will also show you that art isn’t a pastime for those who can afford it but something that all people can experience.

Final Project Idea

As someone who is more interested in the field of Illustration, I would like to combine photography and illustration for my personal project. One idea I have is to take pictures of busy subways and draw various creatures interacting with the people. For example, I would draw a giant snake monster using the rails as a way to move around or having mermaids hang out in at a park fountain. An artist named Sadi Tekin does something very similar to this where he draws cute monsters interacting with sort of interacting with people or the environment. An artist on deviantart called Ninja-Jamal does something very similar to what I want to do.

 

ICP Gallery Report

                                                                     Gallery Report

    I visited a gallery which featured the works of many artists on a single topic. The topic, “What is a Photograph?”, talked about exploring the experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s. The gallery puts together artists that, through their use of light, color, composition and outside materials, have questioned people’s definition of the genre.

    The exhibition was held at the International Centre of Photography at 6^th Avenue. The exhibition was shown on at the bottom floor of the gallery and had 5 well lit rooms which held works from 2 of each artist featured in the exhibition in certain rooms and depending on the size of their pieces, the number of work shown in each room was somewhere between 3 to 6. But because of the large number of artist featured in this gallery, I have chosen three artists that I will focus on in this review. The reason that Io have chosen these three artists over the others because of their use of colors and ways they have used the medium stood out over the rest.

    James Welling, born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951, attended the California Institute of during the 1970s where he studied conceptualism and other contemporary artistic practices. During this time, he had also taught himself photography and the history of the medium. His subjects vary but often included architecture, landscape, memory, and basic elements such as light and shadow and color. A lot of the works featured in this gallery are part of a series of color studies called Degradés. They were produced by shading a piece of chromatic paper with a piece of cardboard or foam core, exposing one-half of the paper to a specific color, then doing the same on the other half of paper.  The composition in his works are very well thought out and with the unique combination of warm and cool colors conveys sense of a peaceful emotion and a warm home-like feeling.

   Alison Rossiter, born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1953, uses expired, unexposed photographic materials she purchased on eBay to explore new image-making possibilities. At first, her plan was to use the sheets she bought to make photograms that pay homage to the marked notches in the upper right corner of the film but when she started to develop the paper, the image came out something similar to an abstract drawing because of the chemical changes the sheets had gone through over time. Her pieces are very unique as still give off the feeling like she planned where the chemicals will hit, how long she would develop each sheet and how would it affect the composition.  And because of how long she would develop each sheet; her work would give off this feeling off light fading off the page.

   Travess Smalley, born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1986, creates cameraless collage prints with the use of a scanner, colored paper, magazine pages, drawings, scissors, and Photoshop. His works are created by scanning and rescanning his compositions, zooming into color fields to alter dot patters, pixels, and moiré patterns, working with a copy of a copy in a continuing feedback loop and using the “dialogue” between the digital and the physical to build a composition. His pieces have great composition; keeping in mind of the negative space. The way he puts together his collages, gives his pieces a hidden image and the colors have a psychedelic feeling.