Colour and Transformation!

In Todays lecture we looked at Colour Transformation and how your colour in objects transforms what the object means.   - An Emotional Signifier 

The colour pallet affects the mood of the image as it provides a code to how we should feel - Each colour represents something but with sometimes two meanings, for example - Green is connotations of jealously but also shows positivity - on the 'GO' (traffic lights) Red is a symbol of love and passion but can viewed as danger and fear.      

Photographers with colour ;

• John Paul Caponigro ;

'' Reality exists only through representation. There is no correct way to see things''

• ''photography is a medium, a language, through which I might come to experience directly, live more closely with, the interaction between myself and nature.''

  Robert Maplethorpe - 
• William Eggleston - The 'Father' of colour photography (high saturation+mundane images become important due to his lighting choices
• Stephen Shore - Photographs the everyday/mundane but makes them more through colour

John Paul Caponigro 

Born in Boston in 1932, Paul Caponigro is renowned as one of America’s most significant master photographers. When he was thirteen, he began to explore the world around him with his camera and subsequently sustained a career spanning nearly fifty years. He is currently regarded as one of America’s foremost landscape photographers. 

Acclaimed for his spiritually moving images of Stonehenge and other Celtic megaliths of England and Ireland, Caponigro has more recently photographed the temples, shrines and sacred gardens of Japan. Caponigro also inspires viewers with glimpses of deep, mystical woodland of his New England haunts. 

He approaches nature receptively, preferring to utilize an intuitive focus rather that merely arranging or recording forms and surface details. 

Music has always been an essential aspect of his life. Although he shifted from the piano to photography early in his artistic career, he remains a dedicated pianist and believes his musical training and insight contributes significantly to his photographic imagery. In his photographs the visual ‘silence’ becomes as tangible as ‘sound’.

Paul Caponigro has exhibited and taught throughout the United States and abroad. Recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, Caponigro’s images will be found in most history of photography texts and contemporary art museums.

http://www.independent.com/news/2008/feb/14/emmeditations-silver-photographic-studies-paul-cap/


Using shells, leaves, flower petals, stones, and other detritus from the natural world, Caponigro meticulously arranges found objects into compositions of intimate proportions. The inanimate models are often paired in curious partnerships: Abalone shells are propped against a cross-sectioned piece of wood, playing off of the silver gelatin print’s capability for high contrast. The deliberate positioning of photographic props are the result of a well-thought-out artistic process; for each composition, Caponigro took a week or more to find the perfect complement of light, texture, and shapes. “It would have been too easy to have a simple setup,” Caponigro said. “I would take my time setting up materials and putting them together so that they felt right.” The artist is a naturalist at heart; it is that sensibility, matched with his innate artistic intuition, that allows him to see the potential in these 

Print Information: All photographic prints are archivally processed gelatin silver prints made from original photographic negatives by Paul Caponigro. Prints are dry-mounted on 4-ply, acid-free mat board. They are window matted and signed in pencil on the front of the overmat at the lower right corner of the print, and are ready to frame. No digital manipulation is used at any stage of the process.  Jerry Uelsmann, photographed by Capaigro. http://pdngallery.com/20years/20mostinfluential/uelsmann.html Photographer, Ryszard Horowitz, states ;

I have been aware of Jerry's work for 40 years. All my life, I was very much interested in making pictures as opposed to taking them. Back in Poland, I saw a magazine called Ameryka, a beautiful color magazine. In this issue they showed the work of Art Kane, Ernst haas and Uelsmann. What struck me about his work was that he was doing a lot of darkroom work and in-camera manipulation, and I was extremely taken by the fact that there was someone in another part of the world who thought the same way as me and wanted to do that. His work appears in every history of photography. Also, he has generations of students who spread his gospel. Certain of his images, because they are so strong and so personal and use such bold symbols, once you see them, you cannot forget them. He knows who he is and what he is doing. His work transcends fashion. He 
doesn't give a damn about fashion, and there are only a handful of photographers who are like that.


Harowitz was amazed and struck by the fact that there was someone else out there similar to himself, in
regards to photography.