3 Artists

Oliver Takac 

Oliver Takac is a young photographer from Slovakia that I happen to follow on Instagram. I don’t know a heck of a lot about him but I really love his work a lot and he’s one of my favorite photographers due to his use of contrast and color in his photography. He studied at film middle school in Slovakia and is currently studying at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava to become a director of photography. He worked as a  set assistant production for the movie Red Sparrow. He also describes himself as a colorist in his Instagram bio. As I said, I really like his use of shadow and contrasting color. His work is pretty minimal a lot of the time in that there’s either a literal lack of content in the photograph outside of the use of color and a central subject or there is simply not a lot in the photo and instead the subject is in a relatively bland setting and yet his use of color makes an otherwise boring photo into a very vibrant one.

 

Stephen Shore 

Stephen Shore is a famous American photographer known for his pioneering work in color photography as an art medium as well as his landscapes of relatively mundane scenes. I really like Stephen Shore’s work because there’s almost a feeling of minimalism in his photos that is more abstract then just lacking content. His photos are often of mundane environments such as a gas station sign or a roadway with cars on it. Mundane art has always inspired me for some reason, ever since I was young, so I can really appreciate his work. I feel like a lot of art tries to have some higher order meaning or be of something grand but when it’s mundane, I really appreciate the message it can have behind it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uta Barth 

I feel out of all the photographers I learned about this semester, Uta Barth was certainly my favorite. She is a German photographer most well known for her work with light. After seeing an interview with her about her work, I was instantly hooked. She described why she does what she does and how she challenges viewers to consider the more abstract parts of art and even life itself and become more aware of these abstract components that constitute the natural world around us, in this case light. She received a bachelor’s from University of California, Davis and her MFA at University of California, Los Angeles.