Sophie Style

Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934, began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, and countless other subjects.  Friedlander produced series that sought to capture urban life while playing with spatial depth, reflections, and shadows.  Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the late 1990s. The book I pick is his Self Portrait. He took a lot of pictures of himself through the mirrors, windows and took pictures of his shadow. These self-portraits span a period of six years and were not done as a specific preoccupation. He began as a straight portrait as soon as he found himself in the landscape of his photography. These pictures came slowly and not with plan. He would see himself as a character or an element that that would shift presence as his work would change in direction. He suspects it is for one’s self-interest that one looks at one’s surroundings and one’s self. The camera is not merely a reflecting pool and the photographs are not exactly the mirror, mirror on the wall that speaks with a twisted tongue.

Fredrik Marsh

            Fredrik Marsh was born in Quantico, VA.  He attended the Ohio State University, earning a BFA in Photography in 1980 and MFA in Printmaking in 1984.  Marsh has taught photography at various colleges and universities since 1985, most recently for The Ohio State University and for the University of Georgia Studies Abroad in Cortona, Italy Program. He lives and works in Columbus, Ohio.   The photographs capture a delicate time of transition in former East German cities, just before many diachronic apartments, called “Altbauwohnungen,” were gutted and renovated to make room for a newer, Western lifestyle. These striking images allow for one more brief celebration of these well-worn walls that range from graceful grandeur to ingeniously personal efforts of home beautification. Fredrik Marsh had started to focus on German history in downright unconventional manner. He developed quite a distinct and unusual interest in the remnants of recent, specifically East German history as well as in changes wrought by the rebuilding and the renewal of Dresden following the peaceful revolution of 1989. With his individual photographic interpretation, which is touched by the controversial discussions about recent German history, Fredrik Marsh pays reverence to the great and tragic history of the city.

Andreas Grefeller

            Andreas Grefeller Born in 1970 in Düsseldorf, Germany Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.  Using the camera as a tool of both truth and deception, Andreas Gefeller produces photographs of urban and manmade spaces that challenge the boundaries of everyday perception. His series have grown increasingly abstract. Among his earliest and most straightforward is “Halbwertszeiten (Half-life)” (1996), for which he traveled throughout the Ukraine, documenting people and places a decade after Chernobyl. Gefeller then stitched these images together into a single, large-scale composite, providing a view of the ground beneath his feet so intensely detailed that it appears abstract. Gefeller makes use of these two layers of the photographic eye in all his series. He is an explorer who is not content with a simple discovery but is intent on placing it within a system, and yet he is primarily motivated by the longing to show us images previously unseen which are capable of changing our relation to reality and thus possibly reality itself. He had lots of pictures of something very huge and another picture shows only a part of it. With Andreas Grefeller you can see how this disappearing appears, while at the same time it is preserved for eternity.