Two Photographers

Two photographers have caught my eye.  They are both women, and the work they do could not be more different.  But both of them make stunning images.

A friend of mine let me know about Elizabeth D. Herman.  Elizabeth makes very powerful images of people.  Some series are portraits, some are life in the streets, some are a mixture.  She captures the soul of her subjects in a way that very, very few photographers can.  Elizabeth isn't concerned about making her subject look good, but rather, she brings out something much deeper than just a surface appearance.  

Photograph copyright Elizabeth D. Herman

I find that I respond to these images because she's doing with photography what I try to do with my drawings and paintings.  Her series "A Woman's War" focused on the impact of war on women who have fought in various ways around the world.  This is a similar theme to my "Meditation on War" series and my Iraq and Afghanistan works.  So, to me, it's wonderful to find somebody else who's concerned with the same ideas, but pursuing them in their own way. 

I've swapped a few emails with this young lady and she's doing some great things.  She won a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Bangladesh. This year, she won the Tim Hetherington Award for photojournalism (this is a Very Big Deal in the photojournalism world).  She recently returned from Bosnia, a place where I worked as part of the peacekeeping forces in 1996.  And she's only been out of college for not even three years.  So this is somebody who's going places.  Go look at her website.

The other photographer is Christy Lee Rogers.  Her work is very different: it's sensual.  It's more about color and the shapes of figures, almost as if the painter Rubens was an abstract expressionist photographer.  The figures are anonymous, bathed in light against deep black, swathed in saturated blues and reds and whites, and floating weightlessly in watery space.  Paintings and photographs that are about beauty, color, shape, and light usually bore me to tears.  These fascinate me.  Go look and see for yourself.

Photograph copyright Christy Lee Rogers