Devon Barthold: Style

Dennis Hopper

Born May 17th 1936, he started taking art classes when he was 13. He started out as an actor but he developed a bad reputation for being a difficult actor, he turned to photography in the 1960’s.  He used a Nikon 33 mm camera that his wife gave him for his birthday. He took a lot of monochrome photographs and when he photographed in color he focused in on the way the colors worked together. He has captured many politically driven photographs but he has also captured many portraits of friends and the people around him in life. He liked to colors as an abstract design and would often photograph graffiti from the gangs in Los Angeles. For the series of photographs that I looked at he chose to capture these colorful designs in polaroid photos. 

Willie Doherty

Born in 1959, he mainly photographs his native landscape in Derry. He overlays photographs with text. He focuses in on the political landscape in Derry. He has recently switched over to film and actually made in a video in Braddock, PA. His style stems from his witness of the Bogside Massacre in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He saw how the photographs did not capture the whole truth from this massacre. He liked to capture the sense of claustrophobia in his work and he tends to have darker photographs. His photographs are of locations that do not look very pleasant and are locations that you would not really like to be at in the later evening, he photographs those locations at night to create a dark and creepy vibe. He wanted to show the beauty of Ireland and a site of horrible events and the history behind that. 

Elena Dorfman

Born in Boston in 1965, she got her degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She tends to photograph areas that have a deeper meaning. She likes to layer images to tell stories of what has taken place in these locations or things that could happen if we continue treating the earth the same as we have been. She captures the landscapes evolving overtime. Her photographs tend to have a greenish hue and have a lot of texture to them. She tends to use a wide-angle lens to capture the landscapes. She uses a deep depth of field to capture the entire landscape with everything in focus. There is a lot of contrast in her photographs which causes the textures to stand out.