Emmet Gowin

To view more photos: http://photography-now.net/emmet_gowin/portfolio1.html

Emmet Gowin does not have an official but is in a number of online galleries and very well known and respected.

Explanation of Work:

Gowin first gained attention with his intimate portraits of his wife and family. His almost exclusive use of a large format camera led to both optical and darkroom experiments. Using a 4x5 lens with an 8x10 camera allowed Gowin to expose the full image circle, surrounded by a dramatic vignette, in his family portraits and rural landscapes.

Beginning with a trip to Washington State soon after Mt. Saint Helens erupted, Gowin began taking aerial photographs. For the next twenty years, Gowin captured strip mining sites, nuclear testing fields, large-scale agricultural fields and other scars in the natural landscape.

Review/interview: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/4aa/4aa533.htm

I was not familiar with Emmet Gowin's aerial photographs. This work deals with "assaults in nature." What caught my eye were the large scale agricultural fields. He describes them as scars in the natural landscape. I found it interesting that he was making this statement in the early ninteies and so many of the senior portfolio projects, as well as mine, are dealing with this same idea of human destruction and the natural world.

Price

" Whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it's actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that, with our food, all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water--of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don't care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food."- Joel Salatine

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: a natural history of four meals.Ney York:Penguin Press, 2006.

Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface farm in Virginia's Shenendoah Valley. He raises a ha;f dozen different species and practices a completely organic way of farming. He gave this quote in an interview with Michael Pollan, a botanist and leader in the clean food revolution.

Many people use the argument that organic food is too expensive and not worth spending their money on. Here the owner of Polyface farm discounts this argument. Uknowingly Americans are spending their money on processed, government subssidized food. Although you are buying something cheaper from a large, chain grocer you have already spent your tax dollars on the growing of industrial crops to make the processed food. The cost this has on the environment is much higher than if you bought local and organinc. So many people look at orgainic foood as being expensive, when in reality it is what food should cost.

josephine Meckseper

Josephine Meckseper’s photographs and mixed‑medium installations cunningly expose the links between politics and the consumer worlds of fashion and advertising. The artist grew up in an artistic family with ties to the revolutionary left (her father, artist Friedrich Meckseper, had anarchist inclinations and her mother has been an elected representative of the Green Party).

In Meckseper’s photographic series Blow‑Up (2006), models are dressed in sturdy elastic stockings and the 1950s lingerie that is still sold in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. These life‑size pictures are displayed on a wall that is covered from floor to ceiling with reflective wallpaper printed with pages from the 1976 German mail‑order catalogue Quelle International. The home products and clothing offered for sale in that publication are those that Meckseper grew up with in divided Germany, and they summon the contrasts between the tastes of Western European middle classes and the Eastern Bloc’s mass‑produced, functional, and uniform fashion, which, the artist says, was “part of a planned economy and not a status symbol. -MOMA

Supportive Gallery- http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/josephine_meckseper.htm

Review of Work-
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E0DA1E30F935A35752C0A9609C8B63

Affluenza

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at its highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic possessions as possible" Thomas Merton

Merton, Thomas. "Seeds." Shambhala Publication Inc. 2002

Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, was an influential Catholic writer, poet, activist, and speaker. He dealt mostly with topics of spirituality and their connection with world issues.

This book is a compilation of essays and excerpts from books written by Thomas Merton. In this section, titled, The World We Live In, Merton writes about his views on the Western culture and consumerism. Later on, after this quote, Merton goes on to state that he believes America is too focused on meaningless, synthetic pleasures. he also states that living this way has already affected the world in a negative way.

My project's purpose is to encourage people to get back to basics and not buy processed and packaged food. Companies invent new, exciting, processed foods every day and advertisers push the selling of these packaged foods. America's people are constantly being encouraged to buy some new food product, whether it be squeezable yogurt in a tube or cheese in a can. Our society always wants more and more of the best, the newest, the most popular. The food industry is a huge part of this continuous cycle of desire and demand.

Mikhael Subotzky

The history of documentary photography plays a decisive role in Mikhael Subotzky’s work. At an early age, the artist was exposed to the activist work of his uncle, Gideon Mendel, one of South Africa’s notable “struggle photographers,” and he grew up in a milieu of commitment to social democracy.

Subotzky’s most recent project, Beaufort West (2006–08), premiering in North America in this exhibition, is named after a small town in the Karoo Desert along the busy route between Cape Town and Johannesburg. The Beaufort West Prison, established in 1873, is blatantly visible in the community, oddly situated in a traffic circle in the center of town. Subotzky’s images portray life inside and outside the prison, focusing on the disparity between the city’s affluent neighborhoods and its fringes that are plagued by endemic poverty. The town’s social problems include petty theft, youth prostitution, and a very high rate of unemployment. Taken with a medium‑format camera in existing light, the pictures articulate multiple narratives. His scenes are at once introspective and direct, reflecting both the individual and the systemic aspects of South Africa’s colonialist legacy in the postapartheid age.

Interview:
http://aperture.org/store/mag-webex-subotzky.html

Link to Supportive Gallery:
www.moma.org

Link To Website:
http://www.imagesby.com/main.html

Michael Pollan Video on Local Food

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFNzabpQ2X0

Distance

"In the United States, food typicaly travels between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers from farm to plate. 25% farther than in 1980" -Brian Halweil (World Watch Institute)

Mackinon, J.B. , and Smith, Alisa. Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100 Mile Diet. New York. Three Rivers Press.2007

J.B Mackinon has been awared three National Magazine Awards as a freelance writer.
Alisa Smith has been published in Outside, Explore, and other periodicals.
Both J.B. Mackinon and Alisa Smith went a 100% local diet for a year.

Plenty tells the story of this couple on their journey of one year of local eating. They rely completely on local markets, local farms, dairies, and fisherman to supply their food. They reject the unsustainable and fuel ineficiant diet of most Americans. They bring up the fact that food travels thousands of miles to get from the farm to the plate. In this book they vow to eat food within 100 miles of their home. By doing this they proove that living on the "SUV Diet" is not the only way to surviv on America.

Video on Topic:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFNzabpQ2X0

I am hoping to inspire people, through my project, to live their lives in a more sustainable way. Many people don't think about the fact that their food has traveled thousands of miles and are unaware of the effects this system has on the earth. This book shows that a local diet is possible. This book is inspiring and full of information that more people should be aware of. I hope that my project will educate people and inspire some to look at their lives in a different way.