Reply To: Critique my work please?

[Visionthing]

Hi Aaron,

Pretty impressive for your age! I have some suggestions:

–  You need to edit the images you show. When you clump portraiture and landscape together in a quantity

that is visually overwhelming for the viewer, ALL your photos become less interesting. It’s hard to concentrate

on your stand out images because the others are competing for my eye.

–  If you’re able put your portrait in one category [folder] and landscapes in another that would be better.

–   You have mastered keeping your images simple.

–   Be careful how much you pump up the color, too much and it starts

looking too candy coated. And as impressive as your images are, you

still need to work on finding your OWN voice, your own style. The

images you show look too much like so many other people’s images.

This is probably the hardest and longest part of one’s photography to

develop. We ALL start out copying those we admire, but you need to

develop your own unique voice as a photographer.

 

There are photographers who’s work are completely recognizable as their own:

Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, Annie Leibowitz, Sally Mann, Elizabeth Messina, Frank Ockenfels to name a few.

 

Keep looking at work from a variety of not only photographers but artist of all sorts.

Film makers, artists,  musicians etc…

You can find inspiration and ideas almost anywhere. One photographer I know was fascinated by an American artist named Joseph Cornell. Cornell’s most characteristic art works were boxed assemblages created from found objects. These are simple shadow boxes, usually fronted with a glass pane, in which he arranged eclectic fragments of photographs or Victorian bric a brac. Check out his work.

Anyway this photographer loved these boxes and Cornell as an artist. He looked up where Cornell lived trying to understand where his creativity came from. He found he lived in an ordinary house on a street called Utopia Parkway in Flushings New York. Well Utopia parkway makes you think he was surrounded by a fantasy world from which to draw from, that’s what the photographer assumed.

Once he saw that location was ordinary at best he asked himself,  ‘Wow, Utopia Parkway. What would life look like if one was to live on a street called Utopia Parkway?”

That one question sent this photographer on a 2 year project shooting images that he felt expressed what living on a road like that

would look like.

My point is you never know where your inspiration will come from. Keep looking, keep shooting, carry a notebook to jot down ideas to try.

I love going to art museums pick out art I love, then I take 1 or 2 elements from the art work and try to use it in photographic work.

Your unique voice will come but you need to keep shooting!

Good Luck.