Chen Style Paragraphs

Peter Hujar

From his photographs, Peter’s style is that he creates images in a way that makes the viewer feel as if they were alone. New York City is busy and vibrant city filled with people of all different types of cultural backgrounds. One may think it's difficult to feel lonely in such a city but it’s quite the opposite. Even though you’re surrounded by millions of people everyday, they are all strangers who won’t notice or care if you were gone. Peter does a great job in displaying this feeling of being alone in a populated city but photographing the empty streets of New York City at night. A majority of his photo would include signs that life is present but wouldn’t include a single person in the photo. For example, there would be photos of skyscrapers, massive architecture buildings, cars but not a single person in the frame. In the portraits that he takes, one can clearly see that they are also feeling a sense of loneliness. He photographed the types of people that one would expect to be roaming the streets at night. For example alcholics, gangsters, sex workers, etc. He worked exclusively in black and white which further supported his style of loneliness. Because of the mood of his photo were often dark, he used the contrast between black and white to depict that in his images. 

In Sook Kim

In “Saturday Night” Kim displays different scenarios that can take place on a Saturday night in a hotel. She creates elaborate scenes all different from one another to display each scenario, which makes it difficult to determine her “style” but there are certain consistency in each image. Even though in a hotel every room is the same, she does a great job in separating one scene from the next one with the use of color. It also help set up the mood for each image but the main thing was how she used it to distantly separate each image from one another even though they were all shot in the same setting. Another thing that was constant throughout the book was the use of facial expression. In a scenario like this where the background is the same for the majority of the images, the use of color, and facial expressions were key in depicting all the different scenes in “Saturday Night”

Kenneth Josphson 

Kenneth Josphson loved photography because it allowed him to create something that wasn’t really there. He would take multiple images, and combines them into one scene. He combined things that are contrasting of one another but makes it appear that they are part of the same image. My favorite example of this is in his photo titled “Chicago”. Even though some of the image is in color while other parts are in black and white, he composed the image in such a way that they complement each other. A lot of his work also has the viewer questioning their perspective on them. He creates images that can depict two different scenarios and leaves it up to the viewer to decide what is happening. Kenneth also had a series where he used printed out photographs to create images. From the image, one can see how the image was created but it makes the viewer question whether it's another photograph that they are looking through or the actual frame itself.