Ferrone Style Paragraphs

Nino Migliori

     Nino Migliori is a photographer from Bologna, Italy. He was born September 29, 1926 and is 93 years old today. The book “Walls” is a compilation of photos taken over 30 years by Migliori who was looking to explore the way that the walls that people walk by everyday could tell a story. His compositions are very simple. For the most part, he photographs the walls straight on, focusing on a small section. A lot of the photos are abstract in that you cannot tell specifically what is on the wall, but with many of them, it is possible to make out shapes or even faces like one would do with clouds. Migliori grew up and lived through World War II where his hometown of Bologna was part of the action. A lot of the events from his early years were the inspiration for him to take pictures of walls because they showed layers and the hardships the areas had faced. He used a film camera because that was the main form of photography during the time period. Migliori was hyper-aware of the fact that photography was part of the new art world so rather than reproducing what he say in front of him, he liked to use it like a palette and canvas to explore and create something interesting to look at.

Michael Wesely

     Michael Wesely is a photographer from Munich, Germany. He was born in 1963 and is now 56 years old. He is best known for his images of cities, buildings, landscapes, and flowers. However, he puts an interesting twist on these commonly photographed things. Wesely uses ultra-long exposures to capture the change of things over time. His exposures have ranged from a few hours to up to three years. He started experimenting with long exposures in college doing portraits and moved it into his other works, too. He began to use the long exposures to show the change of urban settings. Wesely would set up a camera overlooking a construction site and as the building was built or torn down, you can see both what was there before, and what is there after. If a building is torn down, it almost appears that a ghost of the building is in its place as more time passes since it’s been there. His most notable works were a project for the New York Museum of Modern Art and his images of the rebuilding of Potsdamer Platz in Berlin after the wall fell. Both were used to show the change of those locations over time. The MoMA project had four different cameras set up and were there for three years. Wesely has been able to take a unique perspective of objects that we don’t notice changing and capture it all in one image.

David LaChapelle

     David LaChapelle is a photographer from Simsbury, Connecticut. He was born March 11, 1963 and is now 56 years old. Growing up, he dealt with bullying for his sexuality and love of art, and at the age of 15, ran away from home to New York City. At 17, he met Andy Warhol, who then hired him as his photographer. In the 1980s, his boyfriend died of AIDS, which led him to move to London. The counterculture there is believed to have influenced his aesthetic. In 2006, LaChapelle moved to a remote part of Hawaii where he felt he got back to his roots living off the grid, using bio-diesel cars and growing his own food. His love for this simple living and the planet is what inspired his project, Land Scape. Using household items along with other items commonly found among trash, he created models of factories and plants which he then photographed in nature. When glanced at initially, you don’t notice what the items actually are because the perspective he uses makes them appear to be life sized. The project also features gas station models photographed in the rainforest. This project is very much a commentary on the impact humans have on the planet and on the scale that we are doing so. It ends with a life sized doll house with real people in it. It’s interesting how it is essentially the opposite of the rest of the project scale wise.