Photographers (Monica Cintron)

Aaron Siskind

Aaron Siskind was a landscape photographer from the twentieth-century, who began making images in the early 1930’s and continue until his death at eighty-seven. Siskind was also an English and Photography teacher in various universities. His art and teaching abilities helped him become more intuitive about his work.  Siskind found meaning in every one of his images by embracing them and allowing himself to find correlation between the objects in the images.

The subjects in Siskind images are mostly abstract, where the object is transformed and is perceived as something else. In the attempt to create a conversation within the images, he often tried to capture more than one subject to develop more multiple ideas in one image. Many of his images are also focused on texture, from plane surfaces to the frames of his images. Photography opened up a different world for Siskind, he traveled often and set out alone to make a limited number of exposures. Patterns are also a very important constant in his photographs. The realistic texture of his images almost makes the viewer want to touch his photographs, which increased the popularity of his work. The transformation of the objects in his images raises the viewers’ curiosity and astonishment levels. The framing of his images allows the subject to speak to the viewers. Near the end of his trajectory, he used began using more people as subject. However, most of the people in his images are either underexposed or out of focus which takes the focus away from the subject and takes it to what the subject represents.  

Cecile Wick

Cecil Wick is a Swiss contemporary photographer, born in 1954. Wick’s photographs are her depictions of mountains, waterfalls, oceans flowers and blossoms. Her perception of the world is based on surroundings of living things. Her images develop a sense of intuition on the viewers, making them believe that they are created in layers, which attracts the eyes to search further into the photograph. As Wick works to create her photographs she explores for alternative that will create a system that challenges the viewer to decipher what is the subject of her image.
Wick’s images, displayed in Welt-Bilder/World Images, are all of landscapes with and without civilization. The main factor of her images is texture and how that texture is perceived by the viewers. There is no focal point in her image, the objects in her photographs work together to create a whole. Some of Wick’s images are somewhat blurry, however the style is developed to create a sense of mystery and curiosity. Wick’s images are mostly negatives, so the lack of colors does not allow the viewer to focus on one part of the image directly, rather it allows them to explore what the image is trying convey. Her style is very interesting because she makes an unattractive landscape look pleasing and engages the viewers on a quest. 

Luis Gomez

The book Utopia Post Utopia exhibits an exclusive poetically titled series developed by Luis Gomez, called One Thousands Days of Rain. Luis Gomez is a large-scale color photographer from Cojimar, Cuba. Most of his images are made in his hometown or during his travels to Paris, Madrid, London, or the Grand Canyon. The purpose of his work was to allow viewers to feel the atmosphere of his chosen sites.

In One Thousand Days of Rain, Gomez utilizes street lights, which create unique textures in his images. The light in his images allows the viewers to perceive a delicate beauty in ordinary images. The light is the main focus of his images and expressing how the lights transforms the various sites from ordinary to extraordinary is the goal that he successfully achieves. Furthermore, Gomez also successfully captures interesting silhouettes created by lighting, whether the light is disperse throughout the images or is falling on a specific subject. Some of Gomez photographs are out of focus, which dissolves the lighting and allows it to transcend to another material through the eyes of the viewers. As an artist Gomez projects his states onto real sites, by exploring. It is interesting how he lives in a sun-drenched island, but his images do not capture natural light. However, he makes light work to his advantage.