Frozen Foods

Irvin Penn had taken a picture of foods that appeared to be nothing more than a couple of blocks of frozen fruits and vegetables all stacked on top of one another. This, although being the actual display held such an immense amount of meaning for me. When I took a moment and pondered at the possible reasoning to have taken a picture of frozen foods it immediately occurred to me that one of the biggest ideas trying to be conveyed by the image was the idea of change and progression. Thinking back to other paintings that I had seen, there always seemed to be a handful of paintings using fresh fruit and vegetables as the center of the work. I’m sure everyone can relate to those paintings having food such as fruit and bread in a basket, but the main difference between those paintings and Penn’s photograph was the fact that his were frozen as compared to being fresh. Relating back to the idea of change and progression; society has progressed and shifted in such a way that anything frozen is as natural to us as it being fresh. Looking at the image with this idea in mind it isn’t too different than all of those generic paintings with the fruit and other foods in the basket in the sense that in both cases the food itself serves as the main center of attraction and is often organized in a specific way. Before the foods would lay scattered throughout the display in a neat but not necessarily organized manner as compared to the frozen food Penn had taken an image of, being in rough edged box like shapes. It could be possible that the image also represented our society’s change in order and conduct over the years where it use to be more relaxed as compared to now where it could be viewed as being cold, extremely rigid, and in a way almost lifeless much like the frozen foods. The fact that the work of art is also a photograph as compared to a painting could also further support the idea of society’s evolution with time because rather than being painted it was taken with a camera showing how art and expression in themselves are also changing aspects of our society as time continues to pass. While art was often viewed as being a painting or sculpture it has now become subject to many different forms of expression defining it in such a unique way.

-Shujat Khan

Photograph by Irvin Penn                             Painting by Barbara Wells

The Graffiti

I take the 7 train quite often in order to go to Manhattan. I have seen this building several times after the stop from Court Square. This building has many graffitis on it. When I first saw it, I was amazed by the beauty. I knew that this was art. It was a once of a kind building. I haven’t seen the graffiti in a while until last week. It was rush hour when I came across this building once again. It was beautiful and I realized it’s been retouched and added then the first time I saw the artwork. I’ve noticed that it was different than last times. For example, a picture of the woman was added on and some words had other touches on it. It was so beautiful. I wondered who the woman was? A celebrity? A lover? That was when I realized that some art pieces could be never finished. The different perspectives add to the beauty of this artwork. That’s the art of the art piece. It could always be retouched, added, modified, and changed like this graffiti. This graffiti will never have a finishing touch but that’s the art, the beauty of this artwork.

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Irving Penn at Pace Gallery

Morocco, Vogue 1971

This is written next to these two photographs. Vogue. I thought to myself, what a strange title to a piece that’s appears the complete opposite, but perhaps it’s an expression, a way to make you think – or perhaps in Morocco this was the embodiment of vogue, that this was their fashion. I later learned that the gallery entitled it Vogue because it was featured in the famous fashion magazine. This still came as a shock, these pictures do not seem in the style of Vogue, they in fact it seem far from it. For a fashion magazine that normally idolizes models in revealing clothing and make-up, it seems strange to feature women in full length, head-to-toe traditional clothing, with their accessory as bread.

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As we study and attempt to understand the women in these photographs, it can be difficult. These women’s bodies are hidden, specifically the most expressive part – the face. The women have become indistinguishable and seemingly emotionless, these women can be anyone – their expressions can range indefinitely. It’s saddening, but it seems as though these women have been simplified to sheets, likened to mute statues. However, despite this simplification, by looking at the photograph, I can almost feel their pain. The black and white filter creates an eerie quality and an overall gloomy tone. All I can do is try to feel and surmise their thoughts or concerns. And what I feel, is their oppression: their constriction of clothing, their lack of breath and perhaps, lack of free speech. The social implications presented in these photographs are vast, and the insight they provide into Morocco in 1971 is perhaps far greater than we realize. I believe that with these pictures, Irving Penn gave these women a voice, and perhaps what each of us will hear, will all be quite different.

Irving Penn– Turkey Head

This picture really bothers me. In the gallery, the words, “Extreme Beauty, New York, L’Oreal, Vogue, 1986-2007” were next to this picture. I literally stared at this picture for ten minutes on my laptop, zoomed in and out, but I found it so hard to see what Irving Penn was trying to portray as “extreme beauty.” Here is a picture of a dead turkey’s head. Instead of seeing beauty, I find the head to be very creepy. The picture shows many intricate details; you can see the hairs, the beak, the beady eye, and the bumpy skin texture so clearly. What also prevented me the most from seeing any beauty here is the expression of the turkey. The beady eye makes it look as if it was very cautious and angry. I have recently been researching on L’Oreal for a paper, and they emphasize on encouraging people to embrace their “unique beauty.” Even though I really don’t like this picture, I think Irving Penn is trying to make us realize that everyone and everything has a unique, beautiful feature. I still find it hard to see, but I think part of the beauty is the small details that you can see so clearly. And since the background is white, the details of the texture and the color of the head pops out even more; you can see clearly the different shades on the head and the neck. For me, this picture also challenges me and makes me feel slightly guilty; I feel that L’Oreal might have used this picture because it wants to challenge its readers to embrace the unique beauty of the people and things we see around us, no matter how hard it is for us to see.
This is my opinion of what Penn was trying to portray as beauty in this picture. What do you guys think ?
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Art is Everywhere!

One of the best parts about our walks to visit artists and galleries close to campus, is the public art.  Public art not only enhances streetscapes, it also tranforms communities.  At the Highline, we saw the ways in which its public art helps develop local business, improve property value, and inspire new ways to think about the value of art.  The Madison Park installation, “Ideas in Stone” by Giuseppe Panone, integrates natural and human-made materials so that commuters can take a moment to contemplate the City’s relationship to nature.  And Micheal Shvo’s surreal “Sheep Station,” with Francois-Xavier Lalanne’s sheep sculptures “grazing” in a former Getty gas station, helps us remember why NYC is the world’s art capital.  Here are some of the installations we saw today.  What are your impressions of the public art you see around the city?

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Visit to Greg Broome’s Studio 9/17

Greg Broome's delicious plate of food. It looks like cheese from here.

Greg Broome’s delicious plate of food. It looks like cheese from here.

As interesting as seeing how photographs for advertisements were made in addition to photographing moldy food, I was really interested more in how Greg Broome survives as an artist. In my lifetime, I’ve always heard that being an artist meant not earning money, not having a sustainable lifestyle, and always living on the edge. Greg Broome voiced almost similar situations; the key difference is that he seems successful at what he is doing. He mentions how there would be days or even weeks where he would be “technically unemployed”, meaning his agency was unable to find a project for him.

What does he do in his spare time? We saw a little bit of what he does during his moldy food project, but how does he come up with these ideas? It’s almost even appalling to imagine how he maintains his lifestyle during the “drought” of unemployment. Greg goes on to talk about the total opposite side of this lifestyle; the projects where he has to finish it only in a few days. It’s like living a schizophrenic lifestyle. One day you might be working on a private project that you’ve really wanted to do, the next day you’re staring down a huge project given by a rather large company with limited time and resources to do.

It can be quite disheartening to live such an erratic lifestyle, but I’ve seen and known people who persevere through such times. Can you imagine how it would be like to live such a lifestyle?

Happy (Belated) Mooncake Day!

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Just this past Thursday was “Mooncake Day” or also formally known as “Mid-Autumn Festival.” It is a traditional holiday for Chinese people to eat moon cakes on this day. There are different flavors and types of mooncakes and just recently, I began to wonder what the symbols on the cake itself meant. Ever since I was little, I didn’t question the food that was given to me. Inside the cake is usually made of red bean or lotus seed paste. The texture is thick and usually has a yolk in the center.

According to kaleidoscope.cultural-china.com, the imprints on top of the cake “symbolizes a family get-together and reflects the family culture and the special importance Chinese people attaching to the family reunion. The moon cake is not just a kind of food, but more of a cultural element deeply penetrated into Chinese people’s hearts, symbolizing family reunion and embodying spiritual feelings.” The cake was meant to be shared by a group of people, and thus is always a symbol for family union. I never knew that mooncakes had actual meaning behind just being food. It meant being part of a family and part of Chinese culture.

What other foods do you know have meaning behind it?

NYFW- Street Style

 

 “Fashion is the most powerful art there is. It’s movement, design and architecture all in one. It shows the world who we are and who we’d like to be. Just like your scarf suggests that you’d like to sell used cars.”

–       Blair Waldorf (Gossip Girl)

Perhaps it could do without the last condescending line, but the Queen Bee has the fundamentals right: Fashion is art. The last week epitomized this fact with Mercedes-Benz hosting the bi-annual New York Fashion Week where designers from all over the world showcased their latest collections for Spring 2014. Famous designers like Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang, and others unleashed into the world their eccentric designs and trends for 2014. While Lincoln Center hosted a plethora of these interesting outfits, the streets around it also became a runway.

Celebrities, magazine editors, bloggers, and just regular fashion fiends plagued the streets with their own unique outfits—their own unique work of art. Some of them incorporated trends seen on the runway (black and white and retro prints) and many took it as a chance to showcase their own creativity. After all, art is what one makes of it.

From bold prints to detailed jewelry, all NYFW goers were dressed impeccably.  I think that it is interesting to see absurd but definitive outfits not just reserved for the runway. Many people are taking that leap and defining fashion for themselves. Fashion is all about self-confidence and being able to express one’s self or creativity, not through a piece of paper, but through wearable fabrics, silhouettes, and textures. Showcasing your sense of style is a work of art in itself. That is why I believe that New York Fashion Week and just fashion in general, is critical to sustaining the art in our lives.

people in pictures

Life is very complicated. In every person’s life, s/he has to juggle dozens of different things competing for attention. Although the lives of most people would make pretty boring movies, there certainly is drama. In fact, most good movies use situations like disasters and monsters to highlight the drama that regular people face every day. When I think of photography as an art form, I think of the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” A photograph, or a still, is an attempt to take a scene form real life, and capture it one, still image. For example, this picture of Santonio Holmes catching the game-winning catch of Super Bowl XLIII captures all the drama of the back and forth of a close Super Bowl fourth quarter, in a single frame.

Santonio Holmes game-winning catch http://www.pitt.edu/~tas143/catch.jpg

With this in mind, there were a few different collections in the International Center of Photography that were really tremendous. One was Gideon Mendel’s collection of pictures from a waterlogged village in India. Each of the images capture’s the struggle of the regular, ordinary people to keep going even though they live in several feet of water. Another was Sohei Nishino’s Jerusalem Panorama Map, which showed the wide spectrum of different people in one of the world’s most controversial cities. But by far the collection that showcased simple humanity more than any other were the Ponte City light boxes by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse. These three light boxes show images from the fifty-four-story Ponte City building in Johannesburg. The images from show the TV sets, doors, and windows from each apartment. The picture were then organized by floor and apartment number into these three towering light boxes.

ponte city Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

ponte city
Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

As you look at each one, the tiny images that are on every set, the people standing in some of the doors, and the view from each window, who really start to wonder about all the lives going on in those rooms. What did each of these people think as they looked out of the window? Who was watching each of these shows? What did the residents think when a man knocked on their door asking to take pictures of their homes? These questions, and the faces and lives that flash across these panels are photography at its best.