I think my favorite is lori nix...
WILLIAM EGGLESTON
Eggleston's early photographic efforts were inspired by the work of Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, and by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's book, The Decisive Moment. First photographing in black-and-white, Eggleston began experimenting with color in 1965 and 1966; color transparency film became his dominant medium in the later sixties. Eggleston's development as a photographer seems to have taken place in relative isolation from other artists.Eggleston's mature work is characterized by its ordinary subject-matter. As Eudora Welty noted in her introduction to The Democratic Forest, an Eggleston photograph might include "old tyres, Dr Pepper machines, discarded air-conditioners, vending machines, empty and dirty Coca-Cola bottles, torn posters, power poles and power wires, street barricades, one-way signs, detour signs, No Parking signs, parking meters and palm trees crowding the same curb." William Eggleston assumes a neutral gaze and creates his art from commonplace subjects: a farmer's muddy Ford truck, a red ceiling in a friend's house, the contents of his own refrigerator. In his work, Eggleston photographs "democratically"--literally photographing the world around him. His large-format prints monumentalize everyday subjects, everything is equally important; every detail deserves attention.
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1540&page=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Eggleston
GREGORY CREWDSON
Gregory Crewdson's photographs usually take place in small town America, but are dramatic and cinematic. They feature often disturbing, surreal events. The photographs are shot using a large crew, and are elaborately staged and lighted. He has cited the films Vertigo, The Night of the Hunter, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blue Velvet, and Safe as having influenced his style, as well as the painter Edward Hopper and photographer Diane Arbus. It was also in Lee that Crewdson conceived of his later Natural Wonderseries (1992–97), in which birds, insects, and mutilated body parts are presented in surreal yet mundane domestic settings. Photographs from Natural Wonder were shown in the 1991 exhibition Pleasures and Terrors in Domestic Comfort at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In his next series, Hover (1992-97), Crewdson turned away from brightly colored close-ups to black-and-white bird's-eye views of strange situations (a man covering a street with sod, a bear gawked at by onlookers as it rummages through garbage) set in the streets and backyards of Lee. His Twilight series (1998-2001) introduced color and an enlarged scale"50 x 60 inches"to this surreal formula, resulting in decidedly cinematic images reminiscent of the films of Steven Spielberg. These recent photographs have become increasingly spectacular and complex to produce, requiring dozens of assistants, Hollywood-style lighting, and specially crafted stage sets.
http://metroartwork.com/gregory-crewdson-biography-artwork-m-61.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Crewdson
RICHARD MISRACH
Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, California in 1949) is an American photographer known for his photographs of human intervention in landscapes. His works are represented in more than fifty major museum collections around the world.
Richard Misrach is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. In the 1970s, he helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. Best known for his ongoing series, Desert Cantos, a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and man’s complex relationship to it, he has worked in the landscape for over 40 years. Other notable bodies of work include his documentation of the industrial corridor along the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley, the study of weather, time, color and light in his serial photographs of the Golden Gate, and On the Beach, an aerial perspective of human interaction and isolation.
Whether photographing a flooded town, a desert fire, an abandoned nuclear test site or the colors on the horizon emanating from a small town miles away, Richard Misrach draws the viewer into his world through his mastery of color. Ranging from beautiful lakes to secret military bunkers to speed racing on the Utah salt flats, Misrach's work chronicles mans involvement in the desert, while always paying homage to the intrinsic beauty provided by nature. It's through beauty that Misrach's social concerns are most revealed. By pulling the viewer into a glowing light or calm body of water, he presents situations which leave us asking questions about the American desert -- a desert which continues to heal and revive itself regardless of mans actions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Misrach
http://www.edelmangallery.com/misrach-bio.htm
ED BURTYNSKY
To describe Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's work in a single adjective, you have to speak French: jolie-laide. His images of scarred landscapes -- from mountains of tires to rivers of bright orange waste from a nickel mine -- are eerily pretty yet ugly at the same time.Burtynsky's large-format color photographs explore the impact of humanity's expanding footprint and the substantial ways in which we're reshaping the surface of the planet. His images powerfully alter the way we think about the world and our place in it.
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
http://www.ted.com/speakers/edward_burtynsky.html
KARL BLOSSFELDT
He is best known for his close-up photographs of plants and living things. He was inspired, as was his father, by nature and the way in which plants grow. Especially pansies.
Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."
Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Blossfeldt
http://www.soulcatcherstudio.com/exhibitions/blossfeldt/
LORI NIX
I am interested in depicting danger and disaster, but I temper this with a touch of humor. My childhood was spent in a rural part of the United States that is known more for it's natural disasters than anything else. I was born in a small town in western Kansas, and each passing season brought it's own drama, from winter snow storms, spring floods and tornados to summer insect infestations and drought. Whereas most adults viewed these seasonal disruptions with angst, for a child it was considered euphoric. Downed trees, mud, even grass fires brought excitement to daily, mundane life. As a photographer, I have recreated some of these experiences in the series "Accidentally Kansas".
In my newest body of work "The City" I have imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it's human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theaters, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man's encroachment. I am afraid of what the future holds if we do not change our ways regarding the climate, but at the same time I am fascinated by what a changing world can bring.
The twist is that Nix's photos aren't Photoshop manipulations -- they're real images of tiny, painstakingly detailed dioramas that Nix has designed just for these photographs. She built the 3-D scenes in her living room on nights and weekends with the help of an assistant, with each one taking anywhere from two to fifteen months to complete. Nix then shot the dioramas on normal 8x10 film, making her minuscule creations -- about 20 x 24 x 72 inchessmall -- appear nearly indistinguishable from full-size scenes.
http://www.lorinix.net/about.html
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662890/lori-nixs-stunning-tiny-dioramas-depict-an-abandoned-world-slideshow
ANDREAS GURSKY
Visually, Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of big boxretailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our own." Gursky’s style is enigmatic and deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His photography is straightforward.
Andreas Gursky's large-scale color photographs of landscapes, buildings, and masses of people have been likened to paintings. Gursky studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1980s, where he honed his fascination with the ways people live in the world and how their existence impacts their surroundings. In the early 1990s he began using digital tools to heighten formal elements and circumvent the limits of perspective in his pictures.
Gursky (born 1955) first exhibited his work at Matthew Marks Gallery in 1997. The exhibition included 12 large-scale photographs, among them Rhein, a signature work. He has exhibited throughout Europe and the United States, and his work was the subject of a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001, which toured extensively. The Kunstmuseum Basel mounted a major Gursky exhibition, and the Haus der Kunst Munich organized a traveling exhibition of works made by the artist between 1987 and 2007. The Vancouver Art Gallery, the Moderna Museet Stockholm, and the Kunstmuseen Krefeld jointly organized an exhibition of Gursky's work made between 1980 to 2008. Gursky lives and works in Düsseldorf.
http://www.matthewmarks.com/artists/andreas-gursky/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gursky
