Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall was born on September 29, 1946, in Vancouver, Canada.
He received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis entitled Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context.
Together with his two children and with Jeannette, his English wife, whom he met as a student in Vancouver, he moved to London for graduate studies at the Courtauld Institute from 1970 to 1973. He was an assistant professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974-1975), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976-87), and also taught for many years at the University of British Columbia University and lecturer at the European Graduate School
He experimented with conceptual art while graduating from university. In 1977, he produced his first backlit photo transparencies. His work, planned in detail, is part of photoconceptualism, an artistic movement that emerged in the late 1960s in Vancouver. His photographs are transparencies in gigantic format, which produces a cinematographic effect of the work, usually 2 X 2 m, after being inspired by a large commercial in a light box at a bus stop.
His works are the product of both his deep knowledge of art history and the theories that support him. Generally their themes are social. Wall seems like a prosaic painter who opposes the medium itself.
His first individual exhibition was held at Nova Gallery, in Vancouver in 1978. One of his most famous works is Mimic made in 1982, color transparency with a format of 1.98 X 2.29.
Author of essays on contemporary artists.
In 2002 he was awarded the Hasselblad Prize. In 2006, he was appointed member of the Royal Society of Canada. Appointed Official of the Order of Canada in December 2007. In March 20
08, he was awarded the Audain Prize for his entire career.
Nan Goldin
American photographer, born in Washington, D.C., in 1953. She studied at the Satya Community School alternative school, where she began to experiment with photography. He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He received the National Endowment for the Arts scholarship and the DAAD residency grant, Berlin, which allowed him to develop The Other Side project, completed in 1992. His work can be read as social portraits, although the models of these portraits are not unknown people, but people close to his life. He does gender photography, showing an interest in the sexual dynamics of relationships. His themes are friendship, homosexuality and eroticism. His work is influenced by fashion photography and mass culture. His work has been the subject of various exhibitions, the first in 1973 at Project, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, followed by others, highlighting the one made in 1994 at the Neue Natinalgalerie in Berlin. On a collective level, his works have been part of exhibitions such as Love is Blind (1981); Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1990); Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1991); at the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial in 1993; Issues and Identities, Art Institute of Chicago (1994); Fémininmasculin: le sexe de l´art at the Center Georges Pompidou (1995) and Social Documents, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1996, among others.
William Eggleston
William Eggleston, in full William Joseph Eggleston, Jr., (born July 27, 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.), American photographer whose straightforward depictions of everyday objects and scenes, many of them in the southern United States, were noted for their vivid colours, precise composition, and evocative allure. His work was credited with helping establish colour photography in the late 20th century as a legitimate artistic medium.
He says to photograph a person in the same way as a gas station. Quickly, instinctively, and subtly, with hardly any time for the person photographed to notice, react and start posing. Shoot only once at your target; more, it would cause confusion for him. In his eagerness to seek beauty, and the extraordinary in the everyday and banal, William Eggleston (Memphis, Tennessee, United States 1939), democratized photography by treating all his works in the same way. Thus in the images of this pioneer of color, considered today as a living legend, the distance imposed by a neutral look is perceived, where surprisingly the trivial becomes transcendental; The simple in excelso.
But it is just that ambivalence and neutrality that has made his photography seem inhuman enough, for some, to be described as ‘portrait’. However, this characteristic is very significant for Phillip Prodger, curator of William Eggleston Portraits, which exhibits 100 works of the artist at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This is the first exhibition dedicated to his portraits. “Eggleston makes us feel uncomfortable before some of the presumptions in which the practice of the portrait is established,” writes the curator in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition. ”The gravite photographic portrait was similar – it is assumed that looking at a clear photograph, head and shoulders, of someone with a known biography at an intimate distance, should reveal something about him. Looking into the model’s eyes could amount to penetrating his soul. But who could assure that at that moment, at that distance, in that place, from that angle, a photograph tells us something about that person, his motivations, his thinking? Eggleston is the antidote to those great concepts. ”
