Artist Inspired

Inspired photos artist statement

These photos are inspired by William Wegman. He is a photographer that focuses mainly on taking pictures of his dogs with something interesting added into it like having the dog wear clothes. I started out with a picture of my dog sitting in the hallway wearing a scarf but she was difficult to work with because she is a puppy. Also the background and lighting wasn't similar enough to William Wegman's style. So I decided to retake the inspired photos with my bunny. I hung a plain blue blanket over the side of my bed to create a plain background and set up a light that is good for photos. I found this old phone that I decided to use because I wanted it to look like she was doing something that a person would do like talking on the phone. To get her to pose how I wanted I put her favorite snack (banana) on the end of the phone that you talk into. Once she was where I wanted her to be I had a few seconds to take pictures while she was chewing the banana. I ended up getting one with her mouth open so she really looked like she was talking on the phone. The last thing I did was edit the photos to make them look darker, clearer, and more saturated. After I edited the pictures they looked closer to William Wegman's photos.

Photo Research Paper

I have researched two different Photographers for this project. One of them is named William Wegman, who is best known for the pictures he takes of his dogs, and the other is Lara Zankoul who creates very interesting and imaginative photos.

William Wegman is an American photographer who was born in Holyoke Massachusetts in 1943. He started out as a painter and received a B.F.A in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art. He also got an M.F.A in painting from the University of Illinois. He taught at a couple of colleges and his work was exhibited internationally in the 70s. He got a dog because his wife wanted one and named it Man Ray. Man Ray was a weimaraner. When he first took Man Ray home William Wegman took some pictures of his new dog. When he was looking at the photographs he ended up liking the look that Man Ray had in the pictures. He didn’t want to take cliche dog pictures but ideas just kept coming to him. Four years after man Ray died William Wegman got another dog and named her Fay Ray. He also took pictures of her and later she had puppies and they were in the pictures as well. Now he has two dogs named Flo and Topper. All of his dogs became very well known and some of them ended up on Sesame Street and SNL.The dogs also inspired him to write some children’s books.

Lara Zankoul was born in Lebanon in 1987. She graduated with a masters in economics from the American University of Beirut. She taught herself photography and has been featured in Ayyam Gallery and art lounge on Beirut. Her artwork has also been in HEIST Gallery in London and the Guy Hepner gallery in New York. She first got into photography when she was bored of her full time job and started to teach herself photography for something creative to do. It is obvious that her pictures have a message and she leaves it up to the people looking at it to decide what it is. What I like about her pictures are how imaginative and different they are.

One difference between these two photographers is the composition of their photos. Lara Zankoul’s pictures are usually more colorful and are taken from a place where it feels like you are just looking into the room through a doorway. The subject of her photos is a person or multiple people a lot of the time. The people could be doing something strange like floating or sitting in a teacup. In William Wegman’s picture the setting is usually a plain background that is some sort of neutral color. The subjects of his photos are his dogs and he usually has them doing something interesting like wearing a coat or standing on a chair. The breed of dog that he uses is called a weimaraner and they have a very serious look on their faces in all of the photos. The theme of William Wegman’s photos is his dogs because they are the thing that is always in his photos either standing on a chair, wearing a suit, or doing something else to make the photo more interesting. Lara Zankoul uses her photos to comment on human behavior and issues with society. For example, she did a series of photos called The Unseen where a small room was filled halfway with water. The part of the photo that was underwater was the thing about themselves that the person in the photo might hide from the rest of the world and above the water was what they showed the world.

The composition of William Wegman and Lara Zankoul’s photos is similar because they both have very simple backgrounds so that the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the subject. They also both have pretty good lighting but Lara Zankoul has shadows around the edges of her photos which makes it look more dramatic. Both photographers seem to stick with the same subject through most of their photos; William Wegman uses his dogs and Lara Zankoul uses people. The theme of both of their photos is imaginative because William Wegman take his simple looking dogs and dresses them up like people or has them doing random things. Also Lara Zankoul edits her photos to help her create surreal settings or make people look like they are flying.

What I like about William Wegman’s work is how simple the photos are with the plain back ground so that you can focus on the dog which is always doing something interesting. What I don’t like is the couple of pictures where the dog is standing on something strange like the legs of a table or some paint cans and it looks uncomfortable or sad. His photos remind me of my life because I like dogs and have a lot of pictures of my own dog on my phone, but they aren’t quite as strange as the pictures that William Wegman takes of his dogs,. What I like about Lara Zankoul’s work is how imaginative it is and how she invents these new worlds in her photos. It is usually set in a room that has some sort of interesting element added into it like being filled with clouds. Something that I don’t like is I don’t always understand the message behind the photo because it seems like there is one but I don't know what it is. Her photos remind me of my own life because she works hard to put the photos together in a very creative way and I like art that is imaginative like her pictures are.