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Nikki S. Lee is a Korean-born artist who moved to New York City in 1994 to pursue a career in fashion photography. As an artist who is more interested in appearing in her pictures than in making them, she makes images of herself after taking on the appearance and manners of a member of a particular cultural scene, ethnic or sexual group. A keen observer of codes of dress and behavior, Lee selects and studies a group, then enters that group by assuming a new lifestyle for days or even months at a time. In the two photographs featured in this lesson plan, she has joined a group of hip hop stars and Hispanics. Other photos in the series are The Yuppie Project, The Seniors Project, The Punk Project, and The Lesbian Project. Each photograph is a snapshot by either a friend, one of her "new friends", or by a passing stranger. Consider how her role in the photographs differs from the role of the traditional journalistic photographer?
German photographer Thomas Ruff uses the latest technology to create series of photographs that depict portraits of friends and family, architectural space, and diverse borrowed images. His first and most famous series, a group of passport-style headshots, are printed larger than life to confront the viewer with an expressionless, monumental face. Another series of photographs borrowed images of the night sky taken at an observatory. Using digital media, he focused on the stars at night and also enlarged them to make them at once abstract and elusive yet real and detailed. With the statement "photography can only reproduce the surface of things," Ruff allies himself with the objective process of documentation and commercial photography. He commented that, "what people see, eventually, is only what’s already inside them." Any insights about the expression of the sitter or the meaning of the image are left open to discussion, just as the role of the artist in the art of photography is questioned. Is he really completely objective in his documentation or is there a message translated by his technique, composition, and choice of subject matter?
Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs in the series featured here combine candid images of people walking in Times Square with bright, cinematic lighting. After setting up a hidden strobe light to illuminate a spot marked on the sidewalk in a crowded New York City street, diCorcia waited for passersby to step on the spot. He took their pictures from a camera set on a tripod over twenty feet away. The resulting images of ordinary people as they go about their lives are anything but ordinary. The photographs are stark and surreal and invite consideration of the circumstances or stories surrounding the individuals, all of who appear detached yet enhanced by the spotlight. His latest series called "Heads", similar to the Thomas Ruff portraits, focuses on the head and shoulders of the passersby. How can one compare and contrast the methods of diCorcia and Ruff? Ruff asked his friends and family to pose expressionless while diCorcia took photos of random people walking in New York. What is the purpose and meaning in each style?