1. Present- MICHAEL WOLF

2. Michael Wolf- Born in Munich, Germany. Living in Hong Kong
In 1994 Wolf was a contract photographer for Stern magazine, though in 2001 began to work
on his own projects. He focus’ on life in mega cities. His work is displayed in many galleries
worldwide, and has been published as books.
His first project he did was ‘the real toy story’.
He collected thousands of plastic toys made in
China and stuck them around a room,
surrounding photographs of Chinese factory
workers. This piece was used to show the
Scale of China’s mass production, and the
west’s desire for these products.
One of Wolfs best know projects was ‘architecture of density’. This was based Hong Kong’s
highly compressed architecture. By eliminating the sky
And the ground from the images, it creates the illusion
Of the structures being never ending.

3. Wolf’s most interesting project to me is ‘street view’.
This image was taken from street view under the
category ‘portraits’. All of the images in the portraits
category are more of shapes and colours of faces
rather than details. I would usually associate
portraits with clear pictures of faces showing
emotion, so interestingly they aren’t really like
portraits at all. He created these images by taking
photographs of Google street view scenes on his
computer screen. This adds a lot of distortion. Wolf
describes the series as ‘a statement about art’.

4. Past- ALFRED STIEGLITZ

5. Alfred Stieglitz- Born Hoboken, New Jersey 1864.
Alfred was founder of Photo-Secession, which fought to have photography
recognised as an art form, and focused on the craftsmanship of photography.
Alfred’s photography reflects his vision for the future of photography as an art
form.
Alfred liked to use natural elements in his work, as with this first image where he
has photographed a snowy scene. For this photograph titled ‘Winter- Fifth
Avenue’, he stood for hours in a blizzard hoping to achieve a soft-lens effect. He
used natural elements in his images to create an atmosphere. He used weather
to his advantage in his work instead of going to extensive lengths of editing to
achieve his vision.
One method he used that was more extensive than these two for creating
pleasing images, was making platinum prints. This is a process that allows the
photographer to create a wide tonal range on the image using chemical
development. I think that Alfred has used this process on the bottom
image, titled ‘Looking Northwest from the Shelton’, as the tonal range is much
greater on this image than the other two.