YIWEN PAN - 3 PHOTOGRAPHERS PARAGRAPH

            Hamish Fulton

Hamish Fulton was born in 1946 in British. Hamish Fulton is a pretty special photographer because he is a walking artist and he is represented in London by Maureen Paley. As a walking artist, he only converts his walks into various of media based on his experience of walks since 1972; for instance, photography, wall texts, and illustrations. He has begun practicing group walks since 1994. The reason that Hamish Fulton did walking was that he thought walking art as an art form which has its own right. Besides, after his visit to South Dakota and Montana in the 1960s, he made the decisions to create art about life instead of producing objects. He has already walked in over 25 countries in the past 30 years. He joined in the art foundation course at Hammersmith College of Art then due to the support from a tutor, David Hall, he was accepted directly in the advanced level course at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London. After that, he continued studying at the Royal College of Art, London. In his mind, walking is not a medium of art, nor a sculpture. It’s more about a kind of experience.  Since the early 1970s, Hamish Fulton utilized the form of framed photographs and integrated descriptive text. After that, he gradually just used printed text alone, and sometimes associated with diagrams, and various typesets and colors. All his works are actually all about his experience of his walking through different natural landscape. The majority of his work are all in monochrome maybe due to the early time period that he was at. Especially the photobook that I looked up, I could even find that all the roads on the photo seems like all set up in the same place on the frame. The landscape under his photo seems pretty objective to me. I could not sure about the reason, but it seems really does not include too many emotions to me. It builds up some sense of indifferent or maybe just because as comparing to the great natural, human beings are way too tiny and insignificant. Therefore, it might be kind of love-hate emotions and thoughts for me when I was appreciating his photos. It looks really far away to the audience, but it is actually what we should look like in the nature. 

Nicholas Sinclair

Nicholas Sinclair was born in 1954, in London. He was a famous portrait and landscape photographer. Sinclair studied fine arts at Newcastle University. Even though he was mainly well-known by his portrait works, he actually started his photography career from a series of photos he took in the Moroccan circus in 1982. In 1983, this series of photo was first exhibited at the University of Sussex and after that was published in the British Journal of Photography. As a photographer, Sinclair values the location very much because he was looking for some special background which could help to establish the work for him in a more visually aspect so that he actually spent lot of time looking for the background he wanted to use before he began to think about the model he was going to take photo for. The tool he used is Hasselblad camera because he found out that it was an outstanding tool for creating portraits. The square format became the most classic feature of his work after he took portraits for 80 artists. In order to express the sense of rigor black and white evokes and the display of skin tones, Sinclair prefers producing his portrait works in black and white. Moreover, he said the most key point to take portrait is to have a connection with the subject no matter where the characters are in the theatre, in the literature or in the cinema unless the photographer will lose viewer’s attention simply. In my opinion, his works including strong emotions in every single photo no matter it is a photo of landscape or a portrait. In other words, all his portraits are some kind informative to me on different scales because he includes variety of references to models’ job, working methods or materials. Therefore, his portraits are really those works which we have to take time to appreciate with more attention due to plenty of details that we need to look at. This is the biggest reason that why his works look so attractive to me. 

Bing Wright

Bing Wright was born in Seattle, Washington State in 1958. However, he lives and works in New York City. Bing Wright received his bachelor of arts in art history from Columbia University. His photographs have been exhibited at variety of museum including the Tang Museum, Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, the Queens Museum of Art, New York, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Since the late 1980s, Bing Wright capturing photographs with utilizing readymade like mirrors, glasses, and windows. Moreover, he focuses a lot on the surface composition, depth of field and the scale. At first, his works are only in black and white, gradually he added up colors in to his work. Even though I did lots of research but actually I really did not find what kind of tools he utilized for photographing, but it kind of seems like also using frame camera for work? His works send me a strong sense of neat and tidiness due to it always includes not too much elements in the frame or maybe because lots of his works all have strong highlight. The point that I like his photo most is that he always leaves pretty much empty space for blank on his frame so that I think this kind of capturing method enable the audience more spaces for their own emotions and imaginations. Moreover, he always creates a series of photographs which sometimes seems actually pretty similar to each other, so that it might be the little point for my dislike point to his work. If I always look at tons of works which looks almost the same with no big difference, it might make me feel boring and not interested in the photos anymore. But there is pretty interesting to find out that Bing Wright usually capturing something broken no matter it is broken deliberately or accidentally because Wright engages to use photography as the index to capturing an ephemeral moment.