Jack Pierson

Pierson's photography often consists of sensual, sad, and seductive images, sometimes dreamily overexposed, which speak to evocative emotions like loss, longing, and love. He was one of the first photographers to print pages with images bleeding out of their traditional white frames.




American photographer and installation artist. He completed his BFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1984. He is often grouped together with other American photographers who use a diaristic style, such as Nan Goldin and Marc Morrisroe (1959–89). Like Goldin and other contemporary photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans and the American Collier Schorr (b 1963), Pierson concentrates on ambiguity of gender and on evoking an emotional resonance through his images. Approaching photography in a pictorialist and painterly fashion, he uses techniques of over-exposure and colour saturation to give his images an atmosphere of a scene located in the subconscious rather than in any specific place. His image repertoire focuses mainly on men, flowers, landscapes and city scenes. His work of the 1980s reflects his displaced life at the time, while he was living on the road in motels and moving from city to city. Neon Baltimore and Ocean Drive (both 1985; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 156 and p. 169 respectively), shot in motels, are clearly imbued with a sense of longing, loss and melancholy. Pierson also concentrated on street signs, both in photographs such as Angel Youth (1990; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 145) and in jumbled assemblages of found commercial lettering often spelling out witty words or short statements in a variety of visual styles; they recall the text paintings of Ed Ruscha, but given form in three dimensions. In later photographs he developed a clearer, more focused style, with less emphasis on colour saturation, shifting attention to light and composition, as in his landscape Clear Lake, Iowa (1996; see 1998 exh. cat., p. 155) or his portrait Nat’s Back, P-town (1995; see 1996 exh. cat., p. 7). His methods of installing his works for exhibitions are also highly stylised, often incorporating other objects, texts and drawings, alongside his photographs.

website http://www.moma.org/collection/details.php?artist_id=21446

Wolfgang Tillmans

His photographs might capture an evanescent instant, but together -- in groups or pairs, assemblages or arrangements -- they stretch beyond the instantaneous. Communicating among themselves, Tillmans' images develop narratives, forming a world, a habitat, a social milieu out of their variegated resonance.
Like Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson, Tillmans is a documenter of youth. His preferred subjects are young club kids, DJs, ravers, and punks who live their lives outside, splayed out in the streets, huddled in corners, or dancing ecstatically. But his documentary of this culture is too close, too personalized, too stylized, and too selective to be a documentary in the normal sense.

It's as if Tillmans composes the instants he captures. His intent is to portray the personality of this or that world by means of a discrete aesthetic sense that selects and contrives fleeting instants. This is not to say that Tillmans merely inserts himself into all his pictures: on the contrary, his is a collectively contrived world, strung somewhere between photographer and subject, disclosed in the instant of an awaited, tacitly controlled encounter.

Hope and death, sickness and life, Heaven and Hell, are Tillmans' repeated themes. He often juxtaposes disparate images, some effusing peace, tranquility, and redemption alongside others portraying death, sickness, and suffering. For Tillmans the two are always intertwined. In one image his lover Jochan Klein, who died of AIDS, reclines in a bathtub, distant and isolated. In another, two hands are clasped across a blanket; a heart monitor is attached to one of them. Next to this image is an ephemeral image of Kate Moss, hovering and smiling in a light, flowing, white blouse. Between these images something resonates. There is love amid sickness, with angelic grace lingering lambently above it all. Tillmans' world is both sacred and profane, a lost world that nevertheless rediscovers itself in epiphanic moments of bliss and redemption.

Tillmans has also focused his attention on architecture, design, and still life. A 1991 exhibit was devoted to a taxonomy of folds. Here the images develop the formal qualities of different kinds of folded fabrics, with a focus on shape, texture, and color, as well as on exploiting the narrative aspects inherent in clothing. And in 1997 Tillmans devoted a series of photographs to the supersonic aircraft Concorde, evoking by means of environment and light a kind of techno-mythology of the air. He also has a predilection for still lifes of food. In each case Tillmans brings the formal scrutiny of the painter to his photographs, composing the very events that he captures.


link to site here...http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/artist?id=888

Stefan Banz

These are by an artist called Stefan Banz, I like his use of shooting small details and vast spaces alike. I think his work is very atmospheric...

Get more Inspiration!!

I like the dream sequences and the surrealiality of the science of sleep film



Rainy day cinematography


Reverse Motion


Film Cinematography, some great shots, especially like the ones of the person lying on the ground and the person looking up to the sky

Get Inspired!

I have been feeling a bit unmotivated and lagging behind a bit on my college work due to the fact Ive been sick now for over a week, so I have decided to invade youtube and look for interesting cinematography and video clips which might help me get motivated about my project again!!

This is a video piece based on the film Lost in Translation, I think it is a music video for the band My Bloody Valentine. I especially love the cinematography in the first minute or so, the shots are taken whilst in a moving vehicle and there is also play with soft focus and lighting which I love.


This is a Radiohead video -How to Disappear Completely
When I came across this video I thought it was just amazing, like the whole thing encaptures alot of what I want to convey in my own project! The lighting, the distortion of images through different mediums such as water, the sunshine coming through the trees...everything about this video really...


Ok I'm just after realising that these arnt official videos for the song I dont think. I think these are video's that people just made themselves for the music! Here is another amazing interpretation!


Another Radiohead, from 8mm home video.


I find something very atmospheric and even melancholy about balloons!! ha

William Kentridge

Surreal and Dreamlike States

Project Statement and Ideas

'I think artists have a certain responsibility, or placeholder in society and that's to reflect life, create images, which help engage people in their own lives in some way' -Thomas Campbell.

Relevent Research Areas...

I am interested in exploring human experience and existence. I would like to explore the way certain images or texts or situations make us feel certain things, or conveying that emotional state in my work. I would like to consider the ideas of when and why we experience different emotion. I would like to evoke moods and atmospheres while also confirming or questioning our existence perhaps. An area in which I am interested in would include dreamlike states, the sublime... I would like to capture an essence of a slowing down of time, prolonging an experience, slowing them down and embracing them, highlighting small details in our existence. I would also like to capture the smaller details in human existence which go unnoticed day by day. The idea of Fragility of the human existence has become a new idea which I would liek to target in my work.

Artists I am looking at include Stefan Banz, Nan Goldin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Stan Douglas......

Aim of Project:
To make an indistinct narrative on the human existence and our experiences. To create images which evoke certain moods or atmospheres.

How I intend to Realise my Aim:
By taking photographs that focus on a particular area, or small detail instead of capturing the entire area. I might juxtapose this with photographs which are vast and expansive. The expansive images of city/landscapes I think would compliment the idea, as the city/land is the space in which we go about our daily lives in..

Other ideas of realising my project would include documenting experiences and emotions by asking people to tell me some of their stories, about when they were most happy or most sad or frightened, and then playing this over a video piece(or other ways of playing this) The video shots would be an extension of the images I would hope to capture on camera.

'Transport us to that moment, that's what photography does. To stave off the eventual loss of tis memory. There's usually some kind of intense emotional state that inspires the picture' Nan Goldin.

In the past I have worked with video footage exploring light and motion. This was done by recording traffic and recording whilst in a moving vehicle, capturing the light reflections in the buildings which I passed by. I would really like to explore light alot more in my project work, I would like to use it to create a source of mood or atmosphere in my work.

I don't know exactly what my final outcome will be of this project but I do hope that these words could be used to describe it...I hope at least one or two of these would be used to describe my work in the final outcome...
dreamlike...atmospheric...mood...speaks of human existence...capturing small detail...fragile...melancholy...notions of space and time... deranged voices... paranoia and fear(emotion)... blending of reality and fiction...hallucinary...sublime...hypnotically beautiful...capturing moments.

I also enjoy/would like to learn more about...
the fluxus movement
experiemental/visionary film/the poetic in film
the surrealists
(and other maybe more contemporary artists which are working in this way...)