Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman was born on January the 19th 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She is an American photographer and film director.  Her photography work is usually based on herself with different costumes.  Sherman shoots alone in her studio and assumes many roles of; make up artist, hair stylist, author, director, model and wardrobe mistress.
she is sometimes revealed as the author of her photography work and sometimes she is an anonymous person. Most of her photography work is based on many different women and occasionally men.These portraits are not about how she sees herself but how men see women.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born on November the 3rd 1903 and died on April the 10th 1975. He was an american photographer best known for his work for Farm Security Administration which documented the effects of the Great Depression. Most of his early photographs reveal the influence of European modernism specifically for its formalism and emphasis on dynamic graphic structures.

Here is one of the examples of his photographs relating to the Great Depression. this is  a portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born on October the 1881 and died on April the 8th 1973. He was a spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and a stage designer. He is best known for co-foundingthe Cubism movement.

 Most of his cubism style work was sort of sketchy and complicated to interpret. sometimes it takes few minutes to realise what are you are looking at. Just like picture above. It is a portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. Yet it doesn't really look like a human portrait at all at the very first glance. When I first looked at it I thought it was either a bunch of random shapes with different colors or some sort of a city.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was born on April the 2nd 1891 and died on April the 1st 1976. He was a German painter, sculptor, poet and graphic artist.  Ernst studied philosophy, art history, literature, psychology and psychiatry at University of Bonn.
His work is based on juxtaposition of material and imagery, and Subjectivity which was inspired by his experiences.

Sonia Boyce

Sonia Boyce was a British Afro-Carribbean artist who was born in London (1962). Her work reefers feminism. installation, text and range of media including photography.
She studied at art in East Ham College and Sturbridge College of art. most of her early work were big chalk and pastel drawings which show her interest in depicting friends, family and childhood experiences.
In her later works she used other media such as Laser photographs, digital photographs and pastel to create images depicting black life.

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an american documentary photographer and photojournalist who was born on May the 26th 1895 and died on October the 11th 1965. She was educated at Columbia University in New your and studied photography. She was apprenticed to to few New York photography studios. She was best known for her depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration.
Lange died of escophageal cancer when she was 70.

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an american photographer who uses text in most of her photographs. She usually takes black and white photographs and adds some text highlighted in bright colors such as red.  Her work can be sometimes found on ads and galleries. Barbara usually uses words as 'you, 'your', 'we', 'They' and 'I'.
Kruger juxtapose her imaginery text containing criticism of sexism  and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in Kruger's work.
She was born on January the 26th 1945 in Newak in New Jersey.

 

In the first image Kruger has used a black and white photograph with a negative effect. then over-layed with a white text highlighted with red.
the second image is one of Kruger's ads in a shopping mall.

Identity

Everyone in the world has their own identity. It is basically about who you are, what is your gender, your age, your look... everything about you is your identity. Everyone's identity is somehow betrayed even in your own personality.

Each person has their own unique identity. You can't find anyone in the world who has the same details as you. In two words you are just a finger-print. unique, the only one in the whole world.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs, signification and symbols as elements of communicative behaviour. A sign can be called a signifier after the Swiss linguist Fernald de Saussure who defined language as a system linking arbitrary symbols or words.
Signs can be found anywhere: above doors, in toilets, on the roads, walls etc...
each sign (or symbol) as its own meaning.

This is a Fire Exit sign. it can be found in every building, usually above the doors or a wall near the nearest exit. Like all signs (or most of them) they have pictures so if a person doesn't understand the language the sign is in then they look at the picture which can be understood (or interpreted) by anyone in the world

Modernism and Postmodenism

Modernism started during the 1890s and ended during 1945.  It was a movement including architecture, art and literature which rejected the ideology of realism. Most paintings were sort of flat coloured, sharp edged and simplified such as 'Les Demoisiles' by Pablo Picasso (1907).

Postmodernism was yet another art movement which started during 1950s. this movement was full of simplification, performance art, collage appropriation and recycling some styles of the past and themes in a modern-day context.
Movements such as Installation art, Conceptual Art, Multimedia and Intermedia (involving video) are classified as postmodern.