Skip to main content

Photography : Eddie Adams + Portraits.




Eddie  Adams. 

Eddie Adams was born in 1933 in America. He was a photographer and photojournalist, known for his portraits of celebrities and his photographs he produced in 13 wars beginning in Korea in the early 1950s and ending in Kuwait in 1991. He did three tours of Vietnam with the Associated Press and won the Pulitzer Prize.




In class we looked his very famous image 'Saigon Execution' made in 1968. This image's wide spread publication brought attention to the brutality of war in American and people started to question what they thought they knew. It became a symbol for the anti war movement of south Vietnamese corruption and brutality. 

We were asked in class to question this and to do some research behind the story of this image and find out what we could about who these people were and what was happening. 



The man holding the gun is General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The man who is about to be executed is Nguyen Van Lem, the captain of a terrorist gang. I read that he was responsible for the death of one of  General Loans deputies family. After Loan shot Lem, the general said “If you hesitate, if you didn’t do your duty, the men won’t follow you.”

Years later in NYT magazine Eddie Adams was quoted saying:

"Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world"



photographs exclude context. It made me think about the General and what i would have done. I will never be in a position where i have to point a gun at the head of a man responsible for so much death, and decided weather or not to pull the trigger...but if i was could i do it? Should i do it? is an eye for an eye the best way? What else could i do? If i did nothing would he be stopped? If he had killed my family would it be easier? When you put yourself in another persons shoes everything becomes a question and things you thought you knew get flipped around.

Knowing this, what do i think of the image now? I am unsure. I don't think badly of General Loan, i think he did what he thought was right and i am in no position to say it was wrong. But still, looking into the face of a man who is seconds from death, his face frozen in that twisted state of fear forever, is something i find very disturbing and hard to look at.

Shepherd, Bethlehem, 1970


I started to look at more of his work, i found it hard to find a lot of his other work online as quickly as you might for other photographers because 'Saigon Execution' is so famous it is what comes up online first.

I do find this kind of photography very interesting, it really makes me understand the power of a camera and how it can tell a story in a single photo.

Obviously he did a lot of journalistic photography while covering all the wars he did, and he took some amazing images. But i found out he also did a lot of portraiture of celebrities.





Mother Teresa cradling an armless baby orphan at her order's orphanage in Calcutta, India, 1978
Some of the portraits he took are great. I think he has really captured the personality of each person in these.


Arnold Schwarzenegger, Los Angeles, 2003
Clint Eastwood



Ray Charles, 2002

It really shows you how black and white can work to set a tone for the feeling of an image. Also not just black and white but the contrast and shadows within the black and white.

This got me starting to think about portraits...
 I started thinking about how i can create different moods with things like black and white and cropping etc. I decided to start playing around with some of the portraits i took in class on Friday. 
































I think turning something black and white instantly changes how i feel about the image... but what about something else... more than just turning up the contrast, how can i create atmosphere... to get that. I wanted to think about making something mysterious and serious, something that will require some photo manipulation..

I wanted to see how far i could push one image on Photoshop to really set in a more serious tone. I started playing with the brush tools trying to add atmosphere and texture.





I really liked making this and decided to keep going on a separate blog post, so i can refer back to it without getting lost in my posts.






Sources:

http://100photos.time.com/photos/eddie-adams-saigon-execution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODzDGlmh8kg

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/world/asia/vietnam-execution-photo.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42864421

http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com/homedg-1-2/

http://www.monroegallery.com/photographers/display/id/66

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alice Potter

. Digital Media . Illustration . Surface Pattern . Alice Potter   I decided to start my research with Alice Potter. I was interested in Alice Potter's work because it is very different to what i usually look at.  Potter is a London based freelance illustrator and children's wear print designer. Design is something i am not sure i have an eye for, i do appreciate it but i don't tend to find myself attracted to it, or give it as much thought as i probably should. http://alicepotter.co.uk https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AlicePotter I love the colours in this one above, i like how simple it is, but it still translates as an apple. I like the dot print i think it adds a kind of sweetness to the design as well as add something to the flatness of it. I really like these, i love how happy they look because of the use of colour.  Potter draws her work out in her sketch book and then moves onto illustrator where she uses the pen ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Photography : Rommert Boonstra & Laurie Simmons

For photography i wanted to look at artists who use models or staged worlds for their photography because its not something i looked into previous years. From moodel i came across Rommert Boonstra. He is a photographer, poet and theater director. He also taught photography at several art academies.He is well known for his Staged photography and he has Four books are published about his photo works. He uses everyday objects to create these worlds... I am pretty taken aback with these photographs and i am surprised there is not a lot about these images online. The only words i can find to describe them is other worldly. They look like completely different words, like something you would find in science fiction comic. They are just amazing. What i liked about these is the way he has used light and shadows to create the illusion of above and below, in the first 2. He has also used composition and perspective to make you feel like you are inside the world its self. I like...
Post a Comment
Read more

Typography Investagation.

We have started a new unit, typeface and letterforms. I found this very daunting, because, it is a completely new, huge world to me that i have never explored... We watched a film about Helvetica and it was very interesting but like i said i feel really overwhelmed. I wanted to know what happened before more in depth and really look into it as best i could. I decided to calm my nerves by looking into the history of type face, and to, i guess start at the beginning... for myself. while researching i found out that a lot of people agree that the creator of typography was a German man named Johannes Gutenberg. But before he came along books needed to be scribed, by hand. Obviously this was very time consuming, So Guttenberg created Blackletter. I think this was modeled after the scribe's. It has thick vertical lines, and thin horizontal connectors. This was hard for printing, as it looked very dense and squished together. So then came Roman Type, the first roman type was cr...
Post a Comment
Read more