Mimic is a color photograph created by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, in 1982. Its a staged photograph that tries to recreate a scene that he once witnessed of racial prejudice. The picture is held at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, in Toronto. [1] [2]
Wall, after his previous studio work, decided to take pictures in the street, in 1982. These pictures, like his former works, would be staged, with actors. He took inspiration from an incident that he had witnessed, while walking on a street of Vancouver, of racial abuse, and decided to recreate it in a staged photograph. Wall described this picture as a way of trying "to bring street photography and ‘cinematography’ together.” While he took inspiration of street photography by artists like Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, he created something original, what he called “cinematographic photographs”. [3] [4]
The scene depicts an Asian man, well dressed, walking in the left of a sidewalk, while a couple walks to the right. The bearded man, dressed in a more casual way, stares at him, while pointing to his own eyes, making an offensive racial gesture of slanted eyes, in reference to the Asian man ethnicity. The woman, dressed in red shorts, who is walking while holding the man's hand, possibly her husband, doesn't seems to be paying any attention to the scene. [5]
Graham W. Bell states: "Along with broader references to the history of photography, there are also strong ties to the history of painting in the way that he approaches photography. Pieces like Mimic are meant to be hung on the wall like a painting, and not stored in an album or looked at solely as plates in a book. The sheer size and luminosity of the lightboxes makes sure that one cannot ever get the full effect of Wall’s art from a reproduction." [6]
David Campany writes that "Mimic can be read in several ways: photography as a 'mirror of nature' mimics the world; photography mimics cinema or street photography; the Caucasian man mimics the Asian man; models mimic actors who mimic real people (...)". [7]
Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian photographer. He is 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. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Street photography is photography conducted for art or inquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places, usually with the aim of capturing images at a decisive or poignant moment by careful framing and timing. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
Albert William Thomas Hardy was an English documentary and press photographer known for his work published in the Picture Post magazine between 1941 and 1957.
Jeff Widener is an American photographer, best known for his image of the Tank Man confronting a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 which made him a nominated finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer, although he did not win.
Chronophotography is a photographic technique from the Victorian era which captures a number of phases of movements. The best known chronophotography works were mostly intended for the scientific study of locomotion, to discover practical information for animal handlers and/or as reference material for artists. Although many results were not intended to be exhibited as moving pictures, there is much overlap with the more or less simultaneous quest to register and exhibit photographic motion pictures.
Taiwanese photography is deeply rooted in the country's unique and rapidly changing history. Its early photography is often divided into two periods: Pre-Japanese from approximately 1858 to 1895, and an Era of Japanese Influence, from 1895 to 1945, the year the Japanese rule of Taiwan ended. Many photographs from the period during which Taiwan was under Japanese rule have been preserved as postcards. Much of the pre-Japanese era photography was conducted by foreign missionaries and merchants.
A tableau vivant, French for 'living picture', is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically lit. It thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts.
A snapshot is a photograph that is "shot" spontaneously and quickly, most often without artistic or journalistic intent and usually made with a relatively cheap and compact camera.
Stephen Shore is an American photographer known for his images of scenes and objects of the banal, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.
Gaetano (Tony) Gaudio, A.S.C. was a pioneer Italian-American cinematographer of more than 1000 films. Gaudio won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Anthony Adverse, becoming the first Italian to have won an Oscar, and was nominated five additional times for Hell's Angels, Juarez, The Letter, Corvette K-225, and A Song to Remember. He is cited as the first to have created a montage sequence for a film in The Mark of Zorro. He was among the founders of the American Society of Cinematographers, and served as President from 1924 until 1925.
Fred Herzog D.F.A. was a German-born Canadian photographer, who devoted his artistic life to walking the streets of Vancouver as well as almost 40 countries with his Leica, and various Nikon, Kodak and Canon, photographing - mostly with colour slide film - his observations of the street life with all its complexities. Herzog did not achieve critical recognition until the 1990s, when his unusual early use of colour in art photography was recognized. He became celebrated internationally for his pioneering street photography, his understanding of the medium combined with, as he put it, "how you see and how you think" created the right moment to take a picture.
The pioneers of photography in the Philippines were Western photographers, mostly from Europe. The practice of taking photographs and the opening of the first photo studios in Spanish Philippines, from the 1840s to the 1890s, were driven by the following reasons: photographs were used as a medium of news and information about the colony, as a tool for tourism, as an fork anthropology, as a means for asserting social status, as an implement for historical documentation, as a team for communication, as materials for propaganda, and as a source of ideas for illustrations and engravings. The practice of photography in the Philippines was not without the influence and influx of Western-art concepts into the colonized archipelago.
The Vancouver School of conceptual or post-conceptual photography is a loose term applied to a grouping of artists from Vancouver starting in the 1980s. Critics and curators began writing about artists reacting to both older conceptual art practices and mass media by countering with "photographs of high intensity and complex content that probed, obliquely or directly, the social force of imagery." No formal "school" exists and the grouping remains both informal and often controversial even amongst the artists themselves, who often resist the term. Artists associated with the term include Vikky Alexander, Roy Arden, Ken Lum, Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham.
Picture for Women is a photographic work by Canadian artist Jeff Wall. Produced in 1979, Picture for Women is a key early work in Wall's career and exemplifies a number of conceptual, material and visual concerns found in his art throughout the 1980s and 1990s. An influential photographic work, Picture for Women is a response to Édouard Manet's Un bar aux Folies Bergère and is a key photograph in the shift from small-scale black and white photographs to large-scale colour that took place in the 1980s in art photography and museum exhibitions. It is the subject of a monographic book written by David Campany and published as part of Afterall Books' One Work series.
David Campany is a British writer, curator, artist and educator, working mainly with photography. He has written and edited books; contributed essays and reviews to other books, journals, magazines and websites; curated photography exhibitions; given public lectures, talks and conference papers; had exhibitions of his own work; and been a jury member for photography awards. He has taught photographic theory and practice at the University of Westminster, London. Campany is Managing Director of Programs at the International Center of Photography in New York City.
Doug Rickard was an American artist and photographer. He used technologies such as Google Street View and YouTube to find images, which he then photographed on his computer monitor. His photography has been published in books, exhibited in galleries and held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Rickard was best known for his book A New American Picture (2010). He was founder and publisher of the website on contemporary photography, American Suburb X, and the website These Americans which published some of his collection of found photographs.
Tattoos and Shadows is a color photograph created by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall in 2000. It was staged and inspired by a classical work of art, like others of his photographs. It is exhibited in a lightbox at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Staged photography is a form of photography where the photographer, like a director, stages everything in advance to have full control over how his or her idea is visualized. Although the staging of a photograph was already common in the early days of photography, it was not distinguished as a separate genre until the 1980s, when some photographers began to establish themselves as conceptual artists.
Untangling is a color photograph created by Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, in 1994. It is a staged photograph, like most of his pictures, depicting a scene that takes place in a basement workshop where, in the foreground, a mechanic tries to untagle a large pile of rope. The photograph is a color cibachrome transparency, and is exhibited in a lightbox.