Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol exhibit at the University of Denver's Myhren Gallery is a lot of fun. It is wonderful to see all those Warhol graphics and prints of Campbell Soup cans, Chairman Mao, and all those other iconic images. The theme of the show is Warhol in Colorado, and features photographs of Warhol and photographs Warhol took in Fort Collins, Aspen, and other Colorado locations. Warhol was a great pop artist, and I love his work, but I was less than impressed with his photographs. The exhibit is a great record of Warhol's time in Colorado - I personally never knew he even set foot in the state - but the photographs he took - and the photographs taken of him - are less than stellar. Still, it is great to see some of his more famous works on exhibit at the University of Denver. Chairman Mao has never looked better.

Blaine Harrington

Blaine Harrington is a travel photographer, and has been published in a wide variety of magazines. His images are razor sharp and beautiful. They are stunning in color, and evoke exotic images of days long past. His photographs of camels in front of the Taj Mahal and fishermen at dusk in Indonesia are just wonderful. It does not even detract from the images to hear that he hired the camels and their owners to walk in front of the Taj Mahal to make the image more memorable. The only criticism I have is that all of his images have the same yellow orange color. They are beautiful, but it looks to me like Harrington has discovered an image that works, and is sticking to it. In his slide shows, the photographs are much more natural, so it appears that when he has an exhibit, he sticks with what works - stunning but very similar images.

Robert Benjamin

Robert Benjamin's exhibit at the Denver Art Museum is a collection of mostly family photographs, "quiet" photographs as Benjamin likes to put it. These are photographs of his wife, his children, of store windows that catch his fancy. Are these photographs truly art? I guess that question opens up a can of worms. What is art? What is photography? In my mind, photography is a record of the past, instant nostalgia, a treasured collections of memories. Benjamin's photographs of his wife in a scuba mask, photographs of his young children growing up under his lens, are truly wonderful. Benjamin's point is that photographs do not have to be cutting edge, trendy, pushing the edge of the envelope. They can simply record a quiet, beautiful family life. I think his photographs are great.

Portfolio Project Photos

Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon (1923 - 2004) began his career as a fashion photographer for Harper's. At a very young age he went to Paris and set the fashion world on fire with his unique style, making his models move, putting them in motion, and making fashion photography an art. His mentors at Harper's demanded perfection, and this was just the atmosphere he needed to become not just a good, but a great photographer. Eventually Avedon seemed to reach burnout at Harper's, beginning to criticize the industry that paid him. He left Harper's in the 1960s and went to work for Vogue.

The 1960s, with the weird and avante gard fashion of the time, re-inspired Avedon, and his fashion and personal photography reached new heights. His 1966 photograph of a nude woman entwined with a snake (a huge boa) became a fabulous poster and sold 2 million copies. Avedon left Vogue in 1988 and embarked on a new career as a photographer of the rich and famous. He is well known as a photographer of the stars, taking a legendary photograph of Marlyn Monroe.

Avedon's style was to take photographs of his subjects against a plain white background, and would talk to his subjects, and use psychology, to uncover the real person beneath the facade. His photographs of Dorothy Parker and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were highly controversial because of this technique. His photographs of his father, at the end of his life, were very hard to look at, and highly criticized, and even Avedon admits that it might have been an act of revenge on his part to take them.

Later in his career, Avedon spent a number of years photographing people in the American West - drifters, loners, working people - accomplishing some of his greatest work.

Avedon was truly a great photographer, turning fashion photography into art for the first time. He is an inspiration for all photographers.

Portfolio Photo Project

Roy DeCarava

Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) was an American photographer who grew up in Harlem and spent most of his career photographing black and white images of the people, places, and events there. He was mainly a people photographer. He held odd jobs for most of his career as a photographer, eventually joining the faculty of Hunter College in New York.

DeCarava originally studied to become a painter, and considered his photographs as art, not street photography. He first achieved celebrity after collaborating with poet Langston Hughes on a book about Harlem called "Sweet Flypaper of Life" in 1955. In addition to the people and places of Harlem, he also photographed jazz musicians, garment workers in New York, and civil rights protests. DeCarava had a real passion for his subjects, which comes out in his work. He focused on artistic imagery, and his photographs were known for their rich tones and careful use of light. Like Robert Benjamin, he used only ambient light in his images.

DeCarava tried working as a photographer for Sports Illustrated and doing other types of commercial work, but felt he had to compromise his artistic principles too much, becoming a member of the faculty at Hunter College in New York in 1975.