Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Canada. Growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Wall pursued his artistic talent with support from his family. Yet, his decision to attend the University of British Columbia and not an art school surprised his relatives. This would be only one decision that seemed out of character for an artist. During the 1990s, Wall began seeing photography as a medium to connect film and literature to art. To create such a connection, Wall first redesigned his studio, modeling it after "cinematic film production-miniaturized," stated ARTnews.Next, he began shooting his photographs much like a Hollywood movie; he built and dressed large sets, gathered costumes, and hired models. The resulting photographs were a representation of the natural world. |
"I see [photography] as a kind of untheorisable medium, a kind of polymorphic, multivocal and multivalent construction." - Jeff Wall
Zoe Leonard:
Zoe Leonard is an American artist who works primarily with photography and sculpture. She has exhibited widely since the late 1980s and her work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, and the 1993, 1997 and 2014 Whitney biennials. Zoe Leonard experimented with both photography and activism. By the early 1980’s, instead of practicing conceptual photography which at that point thanks to technological advances and new pictorial formats rivaled painting, she was drawn to the form and texture of the gelatin silver process, to which she brought the utmost care, often using long exposure times after taking the shot. From her earliest aerial photographs to her images of museum displays, anatomical models, and fashion shows, much of Leonard’s work reflects on the framing, classifying, and ordering of vision. |
"Something about photography is tied to a very specific relationship with the material world." - Zoe Leonard
Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014. He was professor of Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston from 1983 to 2010. His publications include a photographic illustration of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland(1998) by Dutton Children’s Books, A Camera in a Room(1995) by Smithsonian Press, A Book of Books (2002) and Camera Obscura (2004) by Bulfinch Press and Abelardo Morell(2005), published by Phaidon Press. The Universe Next Door(2013), published by The Art Institute of Chicago. Tent-Camera (2018), published by Nazraeli Press. Flowers for Lisa (2018), published by Abrams Books. |
"A photograph is a photograph. When I am making a picture I am just interested in making a very interesting photograph. I don't care where it's going to go." - Abelardo Morell