Mitchell Phun - The Portrait

Defining Beauty Through Avedon 
This essay is about a photographer (fashion photographer) who focuses on taking portraits of women. He is involved with photographing models for high fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. "Fashion photography is a lot about the clothes but as well as the sophistication of a woman that draws the viewer's in. Avedon uses a variety of things in his pictures that has eventually become his signature: the element of surprise. He has a lot of people who imitate his work but it simply isn't replicated easily.

Self-Portrait as Obscure Object of Desire
Jack Pierson, photographer thats famous for taking photos of naked men over time. Displaying the different changes in a mans body over his life time. He was also the photographer that made the book "self portrait" which attests the nature of people desiring for what they see in the magazines, the haircut, the clothes and the different facial features of a particular person in the magazine. He made himself the desire, he became the object of his own attraction.

Is That Portrait Staring at Me? 
Photographer, Fiona Tan who did video portraits of inmates at a correctional facility. She made the subjects of her portrait work stand still dead pan in the middle of the frame staring directly into the camera lens. The idea was to appeal to the viewer and to provoke different emotions and feelings amongst the viewers. She's mostly known for her outstandingly unique video portraits of people.

A Pantheon of Arts and Letters in Light and Shadow.
Irving Penn, used bold contrasting light to make the subjects of his work stand out and contrast on the plain white background. It is outstanding. His subjects are bold and out front but they wear simple minimal clothing. He usually photographed his subjects in unusual locations but his work always turned out immaculate.

A Photographer's Lie
This essay goes to show what we all do in our every day lives. We choose certain moments to be shared. There are aesthetics that we follow instead of sharing every single bit of detail that compose of our lives. We decide not to share the messy parts of our lives or the broken parts of our careers and our families, we only share the good things which gives the people around us a false impression of how we are living as people.

Embalming the American Dreamer
Katy Grannan, photographer who finds her models by advertising in the classified section of the newspapers. She wanted to find people that she didn't know, people who she would feel uncomfortable to approach. She has the ability to make strangers look like they were made for the job, the models that were strangers did not look like strangers or distant from her. She would interview the models and find out about their lives, and then she asked the models to point out parts of their clothing that were significant and had meaning to them personally.


Response
I loved this reading. I myself, want to get into portrait photography more, photographing more people and the places that they come from. To match their identity with their environment. I have now found a new appreciation for this type of photography. The artists that stand out the most to me would be the last one, Katy Grannan, I'm so interested in the idea of meeting strangers in a new way and photographing them and telling their story through photography. Recently myself, I have become more confident in asking people if they want their photos taken, without prior knowledge of their abilities to strike a pose or to look natural in photos, I like to give people a chance, and to see if they can surprise you. Its always interesting working with new people because you learn a lot about them and you learn a lot about yourself too.