ritaleestevens

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Finished piece

Here is the video of the final working piece it can be worn around the neck safely, and be switched on and off to conserve batter life. I am really happy with the final outcome, there were a few points when I thought I might have to scrap the whole thing and start over but time and the ability to tweak my expectations served me well.

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After getting my screen programed to display the eyeball, and have it bounce around in random order. It was time to work on the actual sculptural elements of my amulet. I started off by working with crayola model magic air dry clay, because I love the texture and it is easy to manipulate. I was happy with the design pieces that I came up with and left it to dry for a few days. Once dry I painted the pieces with purple acrylic paint, but was unhappy with the results and knew that I would not be a able to achieve the rich color I was after with paint, and it would be too messy. I didn't want to risk getting paint on the circuit or screen. So it was back to the drawing board. I took a trip to the local craft store and bought anything that I thought might help me with my project. I ended up wrapping the circuit board with black felt to protect it from scratches and then attached to it a circular wooden Christmas tree ornament to make a secure base for my precious eyeball. I used a new type of clay and scored it with sculpting tools to get it a scaly texture that really helps the eye to pop. After baking the clay I was able to pieces together a really striking piece. To really add som pizzaz I glued color shifting rhinestones to the piece to give it an even more mythical feel.

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Update 11/17/22 

I need to work on the pendant portion of the amulet. I plan on making a base out of felt or craft foam with a small pocket that will hold the circuit board and the convex half sphere to give the illusion of a more realistic round eyeball. I plan on changing the colors of the eye to a violet and teal custom combo to match the twisted witches hat that is part of my halloween costume. I like to add a little to to costume every year and the addition of this amulet will make a real impact long term. I plan to make and add more "spooky" elements to the amulet but have not been able to finalize a design, with this type of project I think it best to just let the design to form organically to bring together the best use of the components.

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[ritaleestevens]

Katie Singer: The internet’s Hidden Cost

This video was really eye opening. I have to admit that I am generally pretty naive when it comes to how things are made, especially in regards to technology. I never would have imagined how involved a process it was to make a computer or cell phone. I myself tend to hold on to my electronic devices as long as I can. But we live in a vicious cycle of the desperate wanting to have the latest and greatest technology to be current and trendy. It is heartbreaking to know that the consumable technology industry doesn't do anything with those discarded electronics. I was under the impression that some tech companies who offer trade-ins were recycling those traded in devices. Even if they are, how much of the “used” devices are they able to upcycle and how much does this recycling actually help the environment, or is it just so the tech companies can say: “Hey, we’re totally green! We recycle!” 

When the video started off I was sure that the negativity about 5g was going to be more about the unknown effects that 5g has on humans, ie. radio frequencies causing cancer, headaches, nausea, and other claims of poor effects on health. 

Honestly this video was a real bummer. I feel bad about the electronics I use, but as a graphic designer I need to use technology to create my art. This information is something that I think should be more readily available to those who are buying this tech as well as ways that we can combat all the e-waste, and the poor processing of unnatural substances used in the making of said devices. 

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 List of sounds

Digging sound (planting)

Sprinkling of water sound (rain)

Wrapper sound (for plant growing)

Happy bell sound (flower bloom)

Finger snap

Funky disco music

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Animated GIF storyboard concept

The concept is a pretty simple one, the planting of a seed and it's growth ending with a snap and a full screen of a dancing flowers. This animation is done primarily in paper, live action and fabric flowers to create visual interest.

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35

 Sam Hurd

I'M NOT MUCH WITH WORDS, BUT HERE WE GO...

My style is distinct, a result of both my unrelenting commitment to my craft and complete trust from clients who commission me.

You’re not going to read about any awards, badges, or “top 10 lists” because what matters is you’re in love with the work that you see and are ready to trust me entirely to do what I do. This trust drives me to find the perfect balance between creative experimentation and honest documentation.

I mostly showcase portraits; my direction and vision come through strongest in these shots. Of course, weddings are about more than just pictures of yourselves, and I’m happy to share full galleries with you upon inquiry.

I hope you like my style. It isn’t for everybody, but if you feel it’s for you then I hope to talk with you soon.

-sam (sam@samhurdphotography.com)

https://www.samhurdphotography.com/about/

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34

Vivian Maier

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief.

An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives. Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings.

Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of various groups of people and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.

Afree spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

Currently, Vivian Maier’s body of work is being archived and cataloged for the enjoyment of others and for future generations. John Maloof is at the core of this project after reconstructing most of the archive, having been previously dispersed to the various buyers attending that auction. Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Vivian’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography.

http://www.vivianmaier.com/about-vivian-maier/

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33

Elliott Erwitt

Born: July 26, 1928 (age 91 years), Paris, FranceSpouse: Pia Frankenberg (m. 1995), MOREEducation: Los Angeles City College, New School For Social Research, Hollywood High SchoolChildren: Amelia A. Erwitt, Jennifer Erwitt, Misha Erwitt, Ellen ErwittParents: Boris Erwitz, Eugenia Erwitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Erwitt

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32

 Man Ray

“I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium of paint, and am working directly with light itself.”So enthused Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) in 1922, shortly after his first experiments with camera-less photography. He remains well known for these images, commonly called photograms but which he dubbed “rayographs” in a punning combination of his own name and the word “photograph.”

Man Ray’s artistic beginnings came some years earlier, in the Dada movement. Shaped by the trauma of World War I and the emergence of a modern media culture—epitomized by advancements in communication technologies like radio and cinema—Dada artists shared a profound disillusionment with traditional modes of art making and often turned instead to experimentations with chance and spontaneity. In The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows, Man Ray based the large, color-block composition on the random arrangement of scraps of colored paper scattered on the floor. The painting evinces a number of interests that the artist would carry into his photographic work: negative space and shadows; the partial surrender of compositional decisions to accident; and, in its precise, hard-edged application of unmodulated color, the removal of traces of the artist’s hand. 2

In 1922, six months after he arrived in Paris from New York, Man Ray made his first rayographs. To make them, he placed objects, materials, and sometimes parts of his own or a model's body onto a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposed them to light, creating negative images. This process was not new—camera-less photographic images had been produced since the 1830s—and his experimentation with it roughly coincided with similar trials by Lázló Moholy-Nagy. But in his photograms, Man Ray embraced the possibilities for irrational combinations and chance arrangements of objects, emphasizing the abstractionof images made in this way. He published a selection of these rayographs—including one centered around a comb, another containing a spiral of cut paper, and a third with an architect’s French curve template on its side—in a portfolio titled Champs délicieux in December 1922, with an introduction written by the Dada leader Tristan Tzara. In 1923, with his film Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason), he extended the rayograph technique to moving images.

Around the same time, Man Ray’s experiments with photography carried him to the center of the emergent Surrealist movement in Paris. Led by André Breton, Surrealism sought to reveal the uncanny coursing beneath familiar appearances in daily life. Man Ray proved well suited to this in works like Anatomies, in which, through framing and angled light, he transformed a woman’s neck into an unfamiliar, phallic form. He contributed photographs to the three major Surrealist journals throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and also constructed Surrealist objects like Gift, in which he altered a domestic tool (an iron) into an instrument of potential violence, and Indestructible Object (or Object to Be Destroyed), a metronome with a photograph of an eye affixed to its swinging arm, which was destroyed and remade several times.

Working across mediums and historical movements, Man Ray was an integral part of The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition program early on. His photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, films, and even a chess set were included in three landmark early exhibitions: Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), for which one of his rayographs served as the catalogue’s cover image; and Photography, 1839–1937 (1937). In 1941, the Museum expanded its collection of his work with a historic gift from James Thrall Soby, an author, collector, and critic (and MoMA trustee) who had, some eight years earlier, acquired an expansive group of Man Ray’s most important photographs directly from the artist. Within this group were 24 first-generation, direct, unique rayographs from the 1920s that speak to Man Ray’s ambition, as he wrote in 1921, to “make my photography automatic—to use my camera as I would a typewriter.” 3

https://www.moma.org/artists/3716?=undefined&page=&direction=

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31

Erwin Olaf

 (born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, 1959) emerged onto the international art scene with his series Chessmen, which won the Young European Photographer of the Year award in 1988. This was followed by an exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, with subsequent solo and group shows at major museums and galleries worldwide, including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Málaga, Spain; Museu da Imagem e do Som, São Paulo; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile. Starting his career as a photojournalist documenting the nightlife of the 1980s, Olaf increasingly sought and defined his own subjects, often explored in series of works in black and white (Squares, Chessmen, and Blacks) and color (Mind of Their Own, Rain, Hope, Grief, Dusk, and Dawn). In recent years he has developed his themes through the form of monumental tableaux, for which he adopts the role of director as well as photographer. His most recent work, in Berlin, Shanghai, and Palm Springs, sees the conclusion of the three-part project Shifting Metropolises (working title), a series of artworks looking at internationally renowned cities undergoing seismic change in the modern world. Rather than fabricating a controlled studio environment, in this trilogy Olaf has shot on location for the first time, retaining his characteristic cinematic associations to produce a body of work wrought with the genuine emotions and neuroses of these places and their inhabitants. Olaf’s bold approach to his work has earned a number of commissions from institutions, including Louis Vuitton, Vogue, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, for which he designed the 2016 Catwalk exhibition, including a promotional video and photographic campaign. He has been awarded Photographer of the Year in the International Color Awards 2006 and Kunstbeeld magazine’s Dutch Artist of the Year 2014, as well as the Netherlands’ prestigious Johannes Vermeer Award in 2011. Additional international awards include the Silver Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival and a Lucie Award for achievement in advertising, both in 2008. Olaf has screened video work at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum at FIT, New York; and Nuit Blanche Toronto, with a live score commissioned for his series Waiting. He has also projected his thirty-channel video installation L’Éveil onto the Hôtel de Ville for Nuit Blanche in Paris, curated by Jean de Loisy (director, Palais de Tokyo). In March 2018, the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo hosted a retrospective of his work. In 2018, the Rijksmuseum acquired five hundred key artworks from Olaf’s forty-year oeuvre for their collection. This followed official portraits Olaf made for the Dutch royal family in 2017–18 and his designing the new euro coin for King Willem-Alexander in 2013. Rutger Pontzen, art critic for Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant, said, “Controversial or not, Erwin Olaf does give a picture of the Netherlands . . . and that makes him 

https://www.erwinolaf.com/biography

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30

Ellen von Unwerth 

is a German photographer best known for her playfully erotic images of female pop musicians and models. Over the course of her career, the artist has photographed Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Rihanna, among many others. “Technique undoubtedly helps make photography magical, but I prefer to work with atmosphere,” she has said. “I think that the obsession with technique is a male thing. I would rather search for a new model or location.” Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1954, she was raised in various foster homes in Bavaria. Discovered by a model-scout in Munich at 20 years old, she relocated to Paris, where she earned a living as a model for the next 10 years before turning to photography. In 1989, she shot Claudia Schiffer for a Guess fashion campaign, a commission which effectively launched her career. Since then, von Unwerth’s images have appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview, and other publications, she has also shot campaigns for brands such as Dior, John Galliano, Ralph Lauren, and Uniqlo. In 1991, the artist won first prize at the International Festival of Fashion Photography, and American Photo Magazine named her as one of the most important people in photography in 1998. In 2017, the artist was the subject of the exhibition “Ellen von Unwerth Heimat,” at TASCHEN Gallery in Los Angeles, coinciding with a book launch of the same name. She currently lives and works in Paris, France. http://www.artnet.com/artists/ellen-von-unwerth/3

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29

Imogen Cunningham

(1883 – 1976)

Imogen Cunningham is renowned as one of the greatest American women photographers. In 1901, having sent away $15 for her first camera, she began her seventy-five year photographic journey. Cunningham soon turned her attention to both the nude as well as native plant forms in her garden. The results were staggering; an amazing body of work comprised of bold, contemporary forms. These works are characterized by a visual precision that is not scientific, but which presents the lines and textures of her subjects articulated by natural light and their own gestures. Her refreshing, yet formal and sensitive floral images from the 1920’s ultimately became some of her most acclaimed images.

Cunningham also had an intuitive command of portraiture but she is noted for her inclusion in the "Group f.64" show in San Francisco in 1932. With a small group of photographers which included Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, she pioneered the renewal of photography on the West Coast.Awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, Cunningham’s work continues to be exhibited and collected around the world.

https://www.imogencunningham.com/about-imogen/

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28

Edward Weston

Edward Henry Weston was born March 24, 1886, in Highland Park, Illinois.  He spent the majority of his childhood in Chicago where he attended Oakland Grammar School. He began photographing at the age of sixteen after receiving a Bull’s Eye #2 camera from his father. Weston’s first photographs captured the parks of Chicago and his aunt’s farm. In 1906, following the publication of his first photograph in Camera and Darkroom, Weston moved to California. After working briefly as a surveyor for San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad, he began working as an itinerant photographer. He peddled his wares door to door photographing children, pets and funerals. Realizing the need for formal training, in 1908 Weston returned east and attended the Illinois College of Photography in Effingham, Illinois. He completed the 12-month course in six months and returned to California. In Los Angeles, he was employed as a retoucher at the George Steckel Portrait Studio. In 1909, Weston moved on to the Louis A. Mojoiner Portrait Studio as a photographer and demonstrated outstanding abilities with lighting and posing.) Weston married his first wife, Flora Chandler in 1909. He had four children with Flora; Edward Chandler (1910), Theodore Brett (1911), Laurence Neil (1916) and Cole (1919). In 1911, Weston opened his own portrait studio in Tropico, California. This would be his base of operation for the next two decades. Weston became successful working in soft-focus, pictorial style; winning many salons and professional awards. Weston gained an international reputation for his high key portraits and modern dance studies. Articles about his work were published in magazines such as American Photography, Photo Era and Photo Miniature. Weston also authored many articles himself for many of these publications. In 1912, Weston met photographer Margrethe Mather in his Tropico studio. Mather becomes his studio assistant and most frequent model for the next decade. Mather had a very strong influence on Weston. He would later call her, “the first important woman in my life.” Weston began keeping journals in 1915 that came to be known as his “Daybooks.” They would chronicle his life and photographic development into the 1930’s.

https://edward-weston.com/edward-weston/