Steve Rood

Although I didn't have any class with Steve Rood before, but I already heard from other classmates that he is a photographer and a digital designer. After the show of Steve's practice, I really want to say that Steve Rood is very talented, especially the photographic works he took are really inspired me. His photography is quite uncommon from the images we usually see on fashion magazines. His photography is like a kind of making common things uncommon. And also, I can realize his attitude of how he think about the relationship between art and life.

I think to be a good photographer, Steve Rood had a good start. When he was just a kid, he already had a good consciousness of taking photo. At the beginning of the lecture, he showed us a black and white compost picture when he was a child. He said the compost was caught on fire afterwards. This event inspired him to be a photographer in the future and capture life. It is interesting to see and record the process of how a normal life object changed.

I think Steve Rood uses some traditional methods to do his photographic works as I can't find too much post production in his practices, but the contents in the works are pretty special and surprising. The first series of images Steve showed us are some shadow images. He explained that this series of images are over exposed. He also blur the intensity of an object's shadow. However, with the dark shadow and the over exposed background, we can still easily find out what the object is. I think this is a good way of how Steve focus on the most important feature of a subject, make feature stronger and weaken the unnecessary elements at the same time. This idea make me think of my own project of photography. What I made are some pictures about smoking and how smoke make people unhealthy. At that time I didn't strongly emphasized the cigarettes or the smoke come out from people's mouth and people don't understood why I took a picture of a person who is smoking.

Another series of images he showed us are quite cool I think. I especially like the one which shows some crystal liquid are running down from a green stick. People can see some liquid globules are pasted together and look like a sort of 3D pattern. In fact, what Steve Rood do is zoom in some part of an object and show people more details. I like Steve has his own way of looking life object around him and how he displays the special beautiful part of a thing in his art work. And I think artsits' job is just finding beauty from our normal life and make it unusual.

Moreover, I'm so keen on the history of photography Steve told us as well. If people of the past want to capture something, they need to use a mirror device and reflect things onto a paper, and people just drawing picture on the reflection. After that, artists will do some more detailed oil painting on the image and make it more real, looks like a real picture. With the development of camera, the mirror reflection method is sifted out gradually. However, I think each period has their own feature. Back to thousand years ago, a oil painting may not that real but the artistic value is much higher. And right now, with the development of technique, everyone has the chance taking pictures for capturing their own life.