Black and White photography homework

I would like to have this one critiqued.

The very first set I did for this assignment just didn't feel good enough. They were really really great images, but I didn't feel like they were the best I could do. Then I went out on another day and got these five. They were exactly what I had in mind when I was told what was expected of the five images. It was really cool.

Vic, you are one tough cookie

Vic Muniz was our last class topic. And this guy's mediums are insanely brilliant. example:

anybody recognize this guy? no? get some art history on ya, for real. This is a famous painter from a completely different decade working on one of his abstradct pieces. Anyway, Vic Muniz made this picture of the famous picture of the famous artist... out of syrup. Look closer? see it? yeah... he's a tough cookie. I wouldn't mess with him. I've tried to draw pictures in salt before and have failed richly.
which brings me to my next part of Vic's work. The sugar children.

Those are both drawn in sugar. But look at the attention he pays to detail, the raised print of the girls vest, and the ripples in the boy's t-shirt. That's hard to do man!

But the rest of it is just garbage. Real talk.

The Sherm

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director that we studied in class and I think she's crazy. But she does good work! Her concepts are intense (which is why I say she's crazy- as in the way her mind works around themes in her art are not something just anyone can flop down and do). But I really really like her early work, her play on classic woman roles in film.

such as:

these are my favorites :)

The Daguerreotype

His name was Louis Daguerre and he was a little full of himself. He was working against time, and plenty of other competitors to develope a good modification of the heliograpgh. He had help from mr. heliograph himself Joseph Niepce, and with the two together came the first "camera". The fun thing is that this new machine, although still a bunch bigger than our cameras today, used the combined process of the camera obscura and the chemical logics of the heliograph. It was wonderful and he got paid big francs for it. Here are some examples, as the Daguerreotype was a common source of photographs for years.

Heliograph- dun dun dunnnnn

There once was a man from france, with paper and light he did prance, to capture the first scape of land, only to destroy it by his own hand. real talk.

Joseph Niepce produced the first known "photograph". He called his method of capturing his images Heliographs, which litereally means Sun Writing. This guy worked from 1793 (when he successfully mixed Bitume with a chemical popular in use of varnish for his time, and did produce an image, but that image would decompose almost immediately) up until 1825 when he had perfected the art of preserving the heliographs he produced.

See, the unfortunate thing about "The very first photo ever created" is that it was also the very first photo ever destroyed. Joseph Niepce had a successful photo before the release of View from the Window at Le Gras, but as brilliant as he was, his common sense got the best of him and instead of waiting to experiment in manipulation with later photograpghs, he used his very first. But we do still have the runner up! Ah the one that survived. And here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for, the first photograph that ever survived, View from the Window at Le Gras.

we also learned about this is photography class. I'm just lending you a crash course yo.

A step away from painting

One of the first things we learned in photography class is: The Camera Obscura (enter creepy voice of Vincent Price).

So basically what the camera obscura means is that someone has a canvas in a completely dark room. I'm talkin- a room that is sealed all, no hole, no cracks, no crannies (whatever a cranny is?). And with this dark room, the artist figures out where to pop a tiny hole in a wall. This tiny hole only lets enough light in to the complete black room that the actual image of the outside is projected onto the canvas. How cool is that? Here's a picture explaining.

So it was a cheaters way of painting, or alot of smart men that made alot of easy money.