Genius of Photography Snap Judgements

Q1: How many photos are taken a year?

It is believed that around 800 million photos are taken in a year.


Q2: How does Gregory Crewdson work?
Gregory Crewdson’s approaches photography in the similar way a film director does to a film. Crewdson hires production crews, scouts for shooting locations and actors. He goes to extreme lengths to find that perfect image. Quite unusual for a photographer he doesn’t take the photos himself hiring a camera operator instead. He is a very in demand popular figure and his work is believed to be worth $60,000 an image. He is known for creating pictures using every day household setting and placing models in unusual positions on the set that look away from the camera. This gives a surreal edge to his work.   

Example of Gregory Crewdson's work

Q3: What prints command the highest price and what are they called?
The prints that command the highest price are the one's made by the well known photographers themselves and as close to the time the photos were taken. These kinds of prints are sometimes referred to as vintage.


Q4:  Seydou Keita - What is different in his pictures in Africa compared to images you usually see?

Seydou Keita was a well-known African photographer in his day.  He was best known for taking good portrait photographs of people. He had his own props for people to work with including a variety of western props that could be used with models who were dressed in tradition African costumes,   His photography focused on the person and pose; he   made the people in the photos look at ease which made the photos stand out even more. The photos that Seydou Keita took gave a more positive image of Africa. This was shown by how happy the people in the photos look and this took away any negative views that are associated with third world countries.

Girls on Bike- Photo by Seydou Keita

   Q5:  How does Ben Lewis see Jeff Walls photography?
Jeff wall is a Canadian photographer known for producing big scale photos. Ben Lewis an art critic has stated that Wall’s photography style is important because he brought it back to the 19th century when painting was important and art is creative.  He compared his work to painting in the sense that everything on his photos look like it was made from scratch even the characters.  Lewis also stated that Wall’s puts a lot of debatable themes into his work like racial stereotypes and how people women and men look at one another.

Mimic By Jeff Wall

Q.6: How many photographs Andreas Gursky produces and what scale (size) are they?
Andreas Gursky, a German visual artist produces large photographs particularly large landscape colour photographs. Some of these are 6 x12 feet.  Gursky uses a large format camera which means that the negatives can be enlarged to make even bigger prints. It is difficult say how many photographs he has produced but art exhibitions have included up to 65 of his works. 

Andreas Gursky Photo