1 min 1 image: Tessa Bedik

Monday, April 17, 2017

Tessa Bedik

Michael Kenna
Desert Clouds, Study 2

Merzouga, Morocco, 1996

I selected this image and the photographer, Michael Kenna, purely because of the beauty in his landscape work. Michael Kenna is an English photographer, born in 1953. The majority of his work is in black and white, have a soft light to them, and are all about landscapes around the world. This image spoke to me in a way no other pictures would have. The softness of the clouds and the sharpness of the sand dunes give an emotion of calm and serenity to the viewer. He also uses very strong vignettes in his work which I appreciate due to the fact that the majority of vignettes are subtle and are to be seen very slightly. But in Kenna's work, they are very pronounced. When I look at this image, I think about the adventure Kenna had to get to that moment, in Russia taking pictures of abstract clouds.

ABOUT

This blog was inspired by the 1 Image 1 Minute written column in X-TRA and subsequent live iterations of the project by Micol Hebron. The inspiration for the 1 Image 1 Minute column was a similar project produced by Belgian director Agnès Varda (and later written about by Rosalind Krauss) for French television in 1983.

For this blog (and their assignment), students in Niku Kashef's photography classes are asked to select a photograph (that they did not make) that inspires or intrigues them in some way and to speak about it for exactly 1 minute (roughly 150 written words). Students post their name, the artists' name, title of the photograph, year the photograph was made and the medium along with their ~150 words.

In the second part of the assignment, students are asked to either use the image they chose to speak to OR a new image and make an inspiration image based on the photographic/2d design aspects of that image (eg direction/type of light, perspective, depth of field, focus, color palate, etc).

To add to this blog and contribute a post, please contact niku(at)csun(dot)edu