Sarah Anne Johnson

Edward Hopper

I saw this painting almost first thing on the whitney website and chose it imediatly. Hopper is one of my favorite painters and this is on of my favorite paintings. It is a beautiful simple composition with grate light and use of color. As a painter myself I appreciate this image for its formal beauty; it is nice to look at.

I have been struggling with how to photograph a person, can you learn anything about a person from their portrait? I have been photographing peoples feet now for a couple years. This is a recent photograph I took while at a dance of a dancers feet. In some ways I feel that this is a portrait and can even tell us something about the person. The one sock, the bandaged foot, the red light, and the out of focus girl sleeping in the background. These are all elements that make the image interesting to read but perhaps also raise questions about the person and what is going on.

I thought this image was also humorous, not that I'm a fashionista but I will never understand the way some people dress. Maybe you need to see more but this outfit was just too much and I think some people need a heads up; guys especially, don't wear pants like this and try to coordinate your entire outfit. This is documentary for social change.

This image is a self portrait that I made while photographing a dance. Its a little creepy and I thought I would play with the idea of the photographer as a voyeur. To me its a humorous image of the male gaze.

TAM TRAN

I enjoyed the youthfulness in this work and the idea of the mascaraed, as children are imaginations give us freedom perform the roles we choose and can slip in and out of different roles. As adults we may perform different roles for different audiences but we tend to generalize the role society assigns us; thats what I get out of this work.

STORM THARP

This image mostly caught my eye because of it's aesthetic appeal, somewhat abject yet calm and engaging. As a painter myself I was also compelled by the technique being used.

NINA BERMAN

I chose this image because of the allusive narrative it is telling. You first notice the subject is holding a gun then you notice his face and appendages have been mutilated, the story like that of many straight photographs, becomes ambiguous.

These are a few images from an ongoing documentary project I am working on with my friend that is a single mother battling breast cancer. Some elements are controlled and composed but still document the reality of her situation.

Roger Fenton
British troops in the Crimea
1855

In sticking with the theme of documentary I thought this was a significant image because of the popularity of Fenton but also because of the controversy that later surrounded many early documentary images (from Crimea, the Spanish Civil War, WWI and WWII), because it was discovered that they were often staged or posed and therefore inauthentic and questioned the realism. It is difficult to tell if this image is posed or not, it may well be some what controlled based on the retarded equipment being used often requiring the subjects to keep still for several seconds. If fenton was directing in this image dose it take away from the realism or the subjectivity of the object?

W. Eugene Smith
Marine Mop-up
Following Japanese Suicide Charge
Saipan, 1944

Since the Vietnam war abject images like the one above have been increasingly censored. I chose this image by Smith because of his importance to documentary photography and to point out how much documentary imagery has changed in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st. Images like this would likely be censored in a modern war because they are unpopular to audiences and may insight opposition to military operations.

Jacob Riis
Men's Lodging Room in the West 47th Street Station
c. 1892

I chose this image because I find it interesting the way Riis would photograph his subjects. He often rejected images that engaged his subjects choosing rather, non-posed images that had a sense of autonomy from his subjects and portrayed their reality. He also photographed candidly and his images often lacked any formal photographic sensibility. The lack of formal aesthetics in the images arguably gave them a greater sense of realism as Susan Sontag would agree claiming that documentary images loose their impact when formal aesthetics take precedence making them objective (art objects) rather than subjective (harsh overcrowded living conditions).