Ron Feinberg - Style Paragraphs

Adulf Rainer

My first photographer goes by the name of Arnulf Rainer. Rainer was born on December 8^th, 1929 in Baden, Austria. Most of the work seen in Rainer’s collection holds the style of overpainting, which is exactly what it sounds like. A photo is taken with whatever chosen equipment, the photo is printed, then laid out to then be painted over with a certain medium. Most of the work Rainer created in his early career was influenced by the Vienna Actionism, a movement that features art under the influence of drugs. Most of Rainer’s works are held with high regards within the field of the arts. You can currently find his pieces hung in the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, along with at his own museum, the Arnulf Rainer Museum in New York City. Within Rainer’s photographic works, it is easy to see he is a man with a fine arts background. The photos are all extremely unfocused, to the point where colors start to blend seamlessly, as though they were paints on a canvas. To describe the images, it would be the most reasonable to say they mimic some styles shown in abstract art. The colors within each photo are extremely vibrant and jump off the page. Even though these colors tend to blend so nicely, there is usually point in the piece that creates a single visual difference, whether that be a place where the color palette shifts suddenly, or maybe a point in the photo that is very focused unlike the rest of the image. I can recreate this style by creating somewhat unfocused images to capture the natural beauty of colors in the surrounding word. Possibly sticking tot a certain color palette with bold outliers within each piece.

Stefano Cerio

Born in France in 1983, Stefano Cerio started his journey as a photographer when he was only 18, where he contributed to the magazine titled Italian Weekly L’Espresso. Since his early start in the professional field of art, his interests slowly shifted to show a love for photography. Most of Cerio’s photos noticeably use a telephoto lens to capture the scene, while he also incorporates and extremely heavy use of dramatic artificial lighting seeing that most of his collections are based around night photography. These two aspects of his photos play a large part in how dramatic his photos turn out. When one takes a look at Cerio’s images, there is almost this sense of eeriness that sets in. Each photo captures a single subject, which is always an inanimate object or some sort of structure. These objects range from old amusement part equipment/statues, to playground equipment. The addition of the pitch-black night setting with these artificial objects creates a very unsettling mood, where the silence of the night almost is visible within the images. These stylistic choices show the side of society that is incredibly artificial. All of these objects and places sit motionless in the middle of night which creates this beautifully unsettling subject, especially seeing the incredible quality and detail of the photos. I can replicate this style by taking night photography with the incorporation of overly dramatic and artificial lighting, taking advantage of lifeless, man-made objects and structures to recreate that ominous feeling the Cerio works with so well. 

Mark Cohen

Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on August 24, 1943. He pursued education at Penn State University in 1961, graduating and choosing to continue his career as a photographer, using the settings of rural Pennsylvania as a backdrop to his images. Throughout his time photographing, Cohen has received two Guggenheim Grants to continue his work which is an incredible achievement in the field. Cohen's photography consists of quickly throwing the camera up to the subject without the use of a viewfinder and taking the image with no knowledge to what he is capturing. Cohen usually utilizes a strangely wide-angle lens for such up-close and personal imagery, while also capturing these images in monochrome (with a few exceptions of some photos in very dull color). The work that Cohen produces heavily touches on the idea that society is ever-moving. His work is coined as holding a “hit-and run” quality where his subjects are individuals passing him by on the street, or strangers he’ll spark a short conversation with. You understand a very heavy sense of tension within the photos due to the movement shown through shutter-speed or the odd angles at which the images are captured at. To replicate this style, I’d have to be very comfortable taking photos of strangers on the street and also taking photos without being able to line up my camera. It seems like a talent on Cohen’s end to be able to capture such a powerful angle without setting up the image prior.