Jodi Cobb

                                                                                                                                                                   

Jodi Cobb is a former staff member of National Geographic and was also featured in the Women Photographers at National Geographic.

She grew up Iran and traveled around with her family so she had developed a taste for traveling and for seeing beautiful images all over. She was noted as one of the first photographers to enter China once it opened back to the West and was also allowed into the coveted hidden world of the geisha of Japan. 

She grew up Iran and traveled around with her family so she had developed a taste for traveling and for seeing beautiful images all over. She was noted as one of the first photographers to enter China once it opened back to the West and was also allowed into the coveted hidden world of the geisha of Japan. She was White House Photographer of the Year and the first woman to be named so. She originally began as a writer/ journalist before eventually getting a masters in photography at the University of Missouri. She found her passion in regards to closed worlds such as the geisha and the women of Saudi Arabia.

David Doubilet: Underwater Photography

David Doubilet is an underwater photographer considered to be among the best all over the world. He also works on assignments with National Geographic and has authored many books. David started shooting with a Brownie Hawkeye in an anesthesiologist's rubber bag when he was just 12 years old. He has photographed under the sea areas from New Zealand to Japan to Scotland to Australia. He captures amazing photos of sea turtles and sting rays to Tahitian women in the water to endless possibilities of long-forgotten ship and plane wrecks.

Here is an excerpt of an article that David speaks about his love of underwater photography:

     "For me, underwater photography is the best profession in the world. It is also the only job I could       imagine doing since grade school. I would have been a disastrous pilot, accountant, lawyer, doctor or  baker. Working in the sea is a visual gift that I never take for granted. We have seen great whites materialize out of the blue, squadrons of manta rays feeding at night, and mating congregations of a hundred thousand green sea turtles. We have followed the path of the war in the Pacific, photographing the wreckage and silent memories.

Every day is not just another assignment; it is a small, but contained voyage of discovery. But for all the joy there is a sense of ever-present doom. Humans have approached the ocean as conquistadors, and what we have discovered we have destroyed through over-fishing and destruction of habitat. The only difference is that we have not tried to convert the fish to Catholicism. And of course climate change and global warming is all about water. The rising sea level and elevated temperatures that directly affect the polar regions are only part of the problem. The vast amounts of carbon dioxide absorbed by the oceans have changed the chemistry of the ocean making it difficult for reef-building organisms to survive. Sadly, scientists predict that coral reefs may only be a memory by mid-century."

http://www.malibumag.com/site/article/david_doubilet/

http://www.daviddoubilet.com/default.asp


 

Alfred Eisenstaedt

I was not sure if we could use a film-based photographer, but I wanted to mention Alfred Eisenstaedt. He was born in 1898 and was well-known for capturing spontaneous moments. One of my favorites is "VJ Day" in 1945 where he shot a sailor who was excited running around kissing any woman he came by.

He eventually became one of the original staff photographers for Life Magazine. He is mentioned as the "father of photojournalism" and is considered a master of the candid shot. He even states that he enjoys catching an image of someone without them knowing they are being photographed. "For the kind of photography I do, one has to be very unobtrusive and to blend in with the crowd." You would think that would raise ethical questions, especially if the people ever see an unwanted image of themselves posted, yet that is becoming harder and harder to defend nowadays due to technological advances and the world wide web. He had his first one-man exhibition in 1954 at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York and he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President George Bush in 1989. He has used a range of simple equipments from an Eastman Kodak folding camera that he received when he was 14 to a 2 1/4" Rolleiflex that he loved to use because he could appear like he was shooting your image because it did not have to be held at eye level.


http://artscenecal.com/ArticlesFile/Archive/Articles1997/Articles0397/AEisenstaedt.html

Robert Leon

     I wanted to check out a documentary photographer and found Robert Leon. He is from Vancouver, Canada. He is a traveling and documentary photographer, but started out as mainly a fashion photographer for about nine years in Italy. While there he started doing travel photography throughout Greece, Italy, and Turkey by finding assignments through the people he knew in Italy. He eventually went to Guatemala, India, Israel, Mexico, and other countries. He really immerses himself into the culture and with the people to get to know them and have them become comfortable with him taking their photograph. From a medicine man in India to the Lacandons of Chiapas, Mexico ( Mayans), he really achieves capturing their unique culture and identities.
     In an article for Shutterbug, he states that he mainly shoots digital unless he goes to a remote place where there is no internet or electricity available. The article can be found here : http://www.shutterbug.net/techniques/pro_techniques/1007robertleon/index.html

His website : http://www.robertleon.com/index.php

Karen Moskowitz

I picked Karen Moskowitz not only for her various celebrity subjects, but for her portfolio #3 on her website :  http://www.karenmoskowitz.com/
She has a wide variety of subjects from Sean Combs to Lisa Lampanelli to dogs to weird little rat looking animals with a furry ball tail?? She's done work for many clients from Wired and Vanity Fair to Absolut and Forbes.
She studied photography at Indiana University and then moved to Seattle where she started taking photos of her musician friends. She is apparenlty known for creating her concepts around the personality of the subjects, so her work is liked by many.
The site does not tell you much about Karen but I was drawn to the her portraits because they seem to have a lively character about them. They are colorful and most seem to show you more about the person or subject within the photograph and not have the background detach or distract you from that subject. Her portfolio is welcoming to me and exciting.

Gwon, Osang: Deodorant Type

      I came upon Gwon Osang's site because I wanted to look for photography used in three dimesional terms. Gwon Osang's background is actually in Sculpture and he was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. He has had many exhibitions, both solo and groups over the past 11 years all over the world, from Korea to the USA to Europe and Japan.

     He has a series of work called Deodorant Type which are sculptures of mainly people ( there are other objects such as a dog and a van, etc.) doing various things from shopping to contortionism. He calls these sculptures "light" because they are made out of hundreds of little photos making a three dimensional being. He wanted to be able to move the sculptures around easily, stating that most sculpting materials are rather heavy and cumbersome to move.

    At first, he made the sculptures of humans close to what the human body looked like and then started to gear towards more of a distorted form such as two-headed men. He worked on this particular series for about five years before he moved to another sculpture series dealing with still-life that still had photographs involved, but they were more simplistic than the Deodorant Type. There is an interview with him on his website where he compares photography to sculpturing, where you can reproduce photos from a negative like you produce a work of art in sculpture by making a model to use as a plaster mold. He talks about how he was at first interested in photography and then began a shift towards the art of sculpting more during the making of Deodorant Type. He pulled many of his ideas for images/sculptures from "contemporary images and advertisement" (as said by the interviewer Ju-hyeon Lee), which Gwon replied with that art circulates back and forth through advertisements and the artist.


Here is the website address: http://osang.net/works/deo.html