John Baldessari (1937)
John Baldesarri is a male photographer from America, who is quite famous for his work with 'found' photographs. On the right are a few pieces of his work with the said 'found' photographs. He spent a lot of his days rumaging through bins, taking old discarded photographs from strangers and changing them to make them more 'interesting'. He often said that he didn't like boring pictures of people just shaking hands or a simple portrait, so he took it upon himself to make these photos abstract and enjoyable. He did this by placing circular, primary coloured stickers onto the subjects faces and filling in object with block colours. Before he began his work as a photographer, he was a painter. He started experimenting with mixing different photographic materials such as film stills and rearranging their original form to make them abtract. However, in 1970, he abandodned painting completely in order to delve into new arts. In that same year, him and five friends burnt all his work form 1953-1966 as part of a of a new project called 'The Cremation Project'. The ashes from these painting were baked into cookies and placed in an urn! Just by looking and Baldassari's images, you can see that he is an abstact artist with a completely different perspective of photography. His images start converstation and make a viewer do more than just look at a photo. Instead, they impose question such as "why has he done this?", "why did he put that there?", "what's the purpose of doing that". Although I'm not completely overwhelmed by his work, I definitely think that it's an interesting purspective on the world and his work has inspired me.
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