Man Ray was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal.
Man Ray got into photography when he realised he didn't like the photos other people took for him, so he brought a camera and started to take them himself. He used black and white film and was also one of the first people using photography/ taking photographs which he wanted to call 'rayograms' but this didn't take off.
His first major work was neither painting or photos, And He was influenced by Picasso and cubism. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all.
He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, and he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer.
Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
He met Marcella Duchamp who challenged 'what is art?' since meeting him and playing chess, chess pieces began showing up in his self portraits, also becoming one of his keen interests.
when he first exhibited people weren't interested in his photographs but they were interested in his 'photograms' which was literally placing objects onto photographic paper and exposing it to light, he became a master of this!.
he controlled contrast and tones within the picture and his work has been shown in loads of magazines.
'YOU HAVE LIBERATED PAINTING' quote said by most people whilst looking at his paintings.
At first he worked in a hotel room using basic equipment, everyone used him as a photographer, including artists, friends, family. (his pictures had a rough edge)
he then upgraded to a hotel room with 3 rooms and got an assistant (ideally a women) to speed up the process.
Man Ray liked playing with shadows and set the camera up 3 meters away from the subject, and he never took more then 12 shots of a person (so he said) and cropped each image very carefully.
he added pencil marks to images to improve them and he understood what made a good photograph which was a contrast / play of light.
he liked symmetry within his images and his fashion images really show this.
Man Ray was never short of money.
whilst everyone was photographing pretty things may ray was there really pushing the limits of photography, he dared to photo the things he wouldn't paint like 'NUDE'.
David Severn is a 21 year old nottingham fine art artist.
part of quad exposure project, he will exhibit work there (derby), he got in by applying to the exhibition (sending off his work) he is interested in people and places which is his theme .
his drawing skills were and still are considerably lacking, so photography quickly became his primary method of creative expression
david has been exploring photography and has started to acquire his own style, although he is always willing to give anything new a try as david see's everything as a learning curve and an opportunity to progress.sever goes to Cornwall once a year on holiday with his Dad and that's where he shoots most of the coastal scenes and waterscapes. However, coastal views are pretty impossible to come by where he lives which is in the central England so when hes at home,he use's a range of cameras including a Holga, a legendary Polaroid SX-70 and a digital SLR to capture urban/street scenes and delve into documentary projects.David has done a series of work called 'thanks maggie' which is a series of photographs exploring the ecological restoration and reinvented social use of ex colliery land in and around the former coal mining stronghold of mansfield nottinghamshire, this project also looks at the current social situation in the town, particularly in relation to its post industrial recovery. The project he is currently working on is 'the showmen' which is about the travelling showmen community in the uk.
Kid Acne is a sheffield based artist and spent most his formative years painting graffiti, creating fanzines and making limited run records on his own Invisible Spies imprint.
He started off designing album covers for record labels and studied fine art but ended up getting into graphics and illustrating. He does graffiti on boarded up houses.he also did a comic book called zebra face ( see below for images).
he has weird ways of creating his images like he will listen to a persons conversation and then create pieces of art from what he heard. this series of work was the put into a book where he compiled all the stories he heard.
he never learnt to use any form of on computer design programs as he prefers to draw images by hand and scan them in.
he likes to go to barcelona to do his street paintings as you cant get arrested over there. this also led him to designing the paint cans from the company he was buying them from as this work was being seen on such a grand scale.
Nowadays, his artwork can been seen throughout the world - both inside and outside of galleries His signature style has adorned products for leading brands such as Prada, Kenzo, Elle, Kid Robot,Brompton and Warp Records, while the man himself continues to paint epic slogans in sub-zero temperatures.
when designing the Prada t-shirts they wanted alot of control over the content/ they had an idea already of what they wanted, unlike smaller companies who let him freely draw/design what ever he wanted.
he offend designed jumpers for friends with his designs and characters on.
he has always said it is important he does his own work along side the work for all the companies, he is very lucky he doesn't have to chase work and that people are always asking him to do/create things for them.
kid acne in influenced by Helmut Newton a photographer that loved to take photographs of naked ladies, most people think they are pervy.
one of the biggest projects he did was a book cover he did that was then turned into a series of toys people could collect, he had to provide drawings which would be sculpted into the final creations which would be placed into mysterious box's (so you didn't know what you was getting) they were then sent all over the world like . new york where he photographed them
The image to the right shows ray with a black eye showing the violence in the family.
His images were taken on the cheapest film he could find, this provided brash colours and bad focus which adds to the authenticity and frankness.Ray, his father, and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, with the alcoholic father drunk on his home brew, and the mother, an obese chain smoker."The door to family life, usually closed, was kicked wide open. The very private was becoming very public."
I love the way the images look the effect is great,
i really like how 'real' they are. None of the images are staged.
