“What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera...notes with relentless fidelity." Berenice Abbott Today we met at the Walt Girdner Gallery where Fred Kaplan's exhibit "Cities: A Pattern in Time" is showing this month. Fred joined us to discuss his work and aesthetic during his varied career.
Fred talked about his career in TV and film and in commercial photography...and finally his transition to fine art photography. His artistic influences included Da Vinci, Mondrian, Diebenkorn, Rothko, O'Keefe and Westin. Their influences centered around the use of space as an element in composition and how that influenced his visual aesthetic. His exhibit is a lifelong effort to use four basic elements of the LA environment...light, sky, concrete and freeways to frame his images...some of which are below. The subsequent discussion ranged from his compositional aesthetic , use of light, drones and the influence of design in his work. We also noted how his images generally had a "Punctum" (Roland Barthes / Camera Lucida). Fred also spent time documenting the LA River and produced a documentary entitled "The River Under the City of Angels" / Kaplan: River Under the City Might check out his website as well / Fred Kaplan Photography Thank you Fred for joining us today and Minh for hosting us at Girdner A few images from his presentation are below
1 Comment
Jim Staub
2/20/2018 08:56:30 pm
Thanks to Mr. Kaplan for the discussion on his photographic output, and those primary lifelong sources of inspiration that factored into the mechanics of his images. The choices of grayscale over color, suppression of extraneous detail through post filtering furthered the desired emphasis on form and pattern found in the matrix of Kaplan's cityscapes.
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