The Top Photography Posts of 2012 (Part 1)

The year 2012 is about to draw to a close, so it's fitting to look back through the past 12 months and see what viewers have been looking for in photography and the visual arts. While this blog features different photographic styles and mediums, most of the popular posts seem to share a common theme. Here then are the top photography posts of 2012.


10) Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein - The Different Body Types of Olympic Athletes

Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein collaboration on athletes from different Olympic events is an eye opening presentation on the beauty and marvel that is the human body. One portrait on one athlete from one event can already make for a great image, but the variety presented by the photographers just goes to show amazing human are when it comes to physical adaptations. Truly, photography series was a fitting entry in time for the 2012 London Olympics.


9) Chuck Close - Not So Typical Daguerreotypes

Chuck Close's use of the century-old photography technique called the daguerreotype process proved to be a refreshing introduction into the medium. Following the same pattern as his gigantic paintings, Close's daguerreotypes are close-ups of his artists friends. He also made portraits of a few celebrity faces, but the daguerreotype process he used presented these familiar faces in a new light.


8) Sally Mann - The Beauty of Family

Sally Mann's beautiful black-and-white portraits of her immediate family have been a topic of conversation for photographers and artists ever since she published these photographs. No doubt the controversial nature of photographing her nude children helped bring her to the spotlight, but after all the hubbub and racket, her intimate portraits are worthy of the highest praise.


7) Martin Schoeller - Up Close and Personal

Martin Schoeller's dramatic close-ups have been featured on magazine covers and posters around the world. The photographer has used his unique style to capture everyone from female bodybuilders to tiny twins, but it's his celebrity portraits that have made him famous. Schoeller's use of hard light and shallow depth-of-field highlights every nook and cranny of his celebrity sitters, making them instantly captivating.


6) Platon - The Power of the Portrait

Platon's portraits are also quite dramatic, but in a different way. As with Chuck Close and Martin Schoeller, Platon uses extreme close-ups to present familiar faces in a new way, but his style is more subdued than Schoeller, and more modern than Close. Platon uses the same philosophy as Henri Cartier-Bresson in that he waits for that perfect moment before clicking the shutter. Based on his portraits, he's found that perfect moment every single time.


These five entries make up the tail-end of the top photography posts of 2012. Interestingly enough, most of them feature photographers who specialize in studio portraits, and three out of the five use extreme close-ups for their work, a technique that has proven popular in the last decade, especially for magazine covers and the like. Check back in a few days for the top five entries of the year.

Sally Mann: The Beauty of Family

Every so often, a photographer will find himself embroiled in scandal because of the sensitivity of his chosen subject. Photographers like W. Eugene Smith and Lewis Hine experience some criticism for their photographs many decades ago, but these days it seems the most innocent subjects can be the most controversial. When portrait photographer Sally Mann began documenting the beauty of her own family, she found herself in the middle of a heated debate on what exactly passes for natural and indecent in the medium. (WARNING: This post contains NUDITY).

Sally Mann first expressed her interest in photography as a high school student at The Putney School, and later took up creative writing in her college and postgraduate years. On her first job as a photographer, she made surrealist landscape images of an construction project at Washington and Lee University. Her photographs earned her her first exhibition, and was her first step into becoming more well-known in the art world.

Her second project in 1988 was what earned her a controversial name in the industry;  At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women is a collection of images which "capture the confusing emotions and developing identities of adolescent girls", and led to some discussion about sexuality and children. Still, the images were tame compared to Mann's most famous work.

In 1992, Mann published Immediate Family, a collection of black-and-white images which featured her three children: Emmet, Jessie and Virginia, all of them under the age of 10 and all of them mostly in the nude. Mann wanted to capture the childhood of her young ones through the eyes of a mother, and she did it through a gothic narrative which bared everything from smoking candy cigarettes on the porch to skinny dipping in the Virginia heat.

Many critics however lashed at the controversial photographs, branding them as child pornography and accusing Mann of being an irresponsible parent. The suggestive nature of the images and their subjects led to the collection being cast along the thin line of intimacy and indecency.

After her Immediate Family project, Mann delved into other areas, going into landscapes with her images of Louisiana and Mississippi, and then exploring the ideas of death and decay by photographing decomposing bodies at a "body farm". Throughout all of these projects, Mann used her century-old 8 x 10 bellows view camera and wet plate glass negatives which she had been accustomed to using since her first foray into photography in her high school years.

Throughout the years, Mann has maintained her position of staunch honesty despite the allegations of eroticism and exploitation. While much some of her fame is derived from the controversial nature of her nude photography work, there is no question that, peeling away the years of unending debate, her photographs are simply beautiful.

This is Sally Mann's official website where there are more examples of the beauty of family, landscapes and death. Many of her publications are still available, among them are Immediate Family, What Remains and At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women.