What separates a great photograph from a snapshot?

In our online Art of Photography course, students learn that good design doesn’t just happen. A snapshot captures a moment, whereas a great photograph captures it beautifully by being composed. All of the elements are chosen and arranged to fit together. Elements such as line, texture, and pattern can add visual interest and heighten a photograph’s drama.

The students discussed examples from photographers Pamela Pecchio and Aaron Siskind, whose work is in our permanent collection, exploring how actual and implied texture can create a visually engaging image, and also created photographs of their own.

Examine these images and consider students’ choices in composing each photograph. Whether you notice the skewed worm’s-eye view of brightly patterned ribbons or the rhythmic patterns of leaves growing between pipes, your eye is drawn through the composition.

The students’ work will be on display in the Museum’s Education Lobby from January 11 through April 14. Pecchio’s work is featured in the exhibition Dwelling: Interiors by Page H. Laughlin and Pamela Pecchio, opening February 10 in the adjacent North Carolina Gallery.

Art of Photography is one of five online semester courses offered through the Museum that students can take for high school credit.

If you have seen Beyoncé’s video for “Run the World (Girls),” you may remember her holding two hyenas on a chain.

She’s making reference to Hugo and his series The Hyena & Other Men. Hugo’s fascination with the “Hyena Men” came about after a friend e-mailed a picture he had taken of a man walking a hyena on a chain in Lagos, Nigeria. The men, called “Gadawan Kura” (rough translation: “hyena guides”), were surrounded by myth and mystery and largely assumed to be drug dealers, bodyguards, thieves, and debt collectors. In fact they are itinerant performers who tame and work with hyenas, monkeys, and rock pythons to entertain and to sell traditional medicine. They are all related, and the tradition is passed down generation to generation. Through a journalist friend and a Nigerian reporter, Hugo was put in contact with the Gadawan Kura, who agreed to let Hugo travel with them for eight days. Two years later, with the project feeling unresolved, Hugo returned to Nigeria and took more photos. These images are more intimate, more informal, and reflect the trust and understanding the artist had developed with the hyena guides two years earlier and maintained over the interim.

Hugo’s fascination with the men and their relationship with the animals—at times doting, at times brutal—led to this series. It was this paradoxical relationship, and not the spectacle that surrounded their performances, that led to Hugo’s portraits. Thematically, Hugo explores the hybridization of the urban and the wild; the interplay of dominance, submission, and codependence; and the fraught relationship we have with ourselves, nature, and animals. In his text on the series, Hugo writes:

When I asked Nigerians, “How do you feel about the way they treat animals,” the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals, but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalized. Or why Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

The NCMA has been fortunate enough to have one of Hugo’s hyena photos, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, on long-term loan. You can see it in the Modern and Contemporary Galleries in West Building.

Beyoncé’s use of the Hyena Men imagery raises questions about appropriation and exploitation, for the Gaduwan Kura and Pieter Hugo were never credited or compensated. The artist has said this about the singer’s video: “I don’t particularly like the Beyoncé song. It all seems so derivative—the music, the imagery … I’m sure the Hyena Men are wondering if they’re going to get paid!”

As for Beyoncé, she has released a statement acknowledging her use of “references” in her videos and stating, “I’ve always been fascinated by the way contemporary art uses different elements and references to produce something unique.”

Whatever your feelings on plagiarism, exploitation, and pop culture, I’m pretty sure we can all agree on the awesomeness of the original. We also have a second Hugo photograph, Naasra Yeti, from his series Permanent Error. It is equally as arresting, stirring, and beautiful. Come by and see them. You won’t be disappointed.

P.S. The New Yorker wrote about it first. So did The Guardian.

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

Image: Pieter Hugo, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007, chromogenic print, On loan from the collection of Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez

Now, 22 years later, 15 of my photographs are in the permanent collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art. One of them—Reidsville, North Carolina, June 2003—is included in the exhibition Landscape Sublime: Contemporary Photography, which closes November 13.

I have met some very good souls along the way. One of them is Huston Paschal, a long-time associate curator (now retired) at the Museum. When I began exhibiting my photographs in 1990, Huston, unbeknownst to me, started following my progress. I was exhibiting everywhere I could (photographs I’d made on Ellis Island), including the just-opened Cup A Joe on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh and the Weems Gallery at Meredith College. When I began to photograph around the Tar Heel State, Huston quietly watched as my new work—and I—progressed.

On the eve of my 50th birthday in 2003, I received a fateful phone call: Linda Dougherty (the NCMA’s current curator of contemporary art) was on the line. Would I like to schedule a time to bring a selection of my work? She and Huston wanted to see it, with a purchase in mind. Well, happy birthday to me!

I am grateful to Linda and to the NCMA and, now, to Jen Dasal, assistant curator, for including my work in the current exhibition. But mostly I am grateful to Huston, who saw in my work, and in the work of other North Carolina artists she watched grow and mature over her years as curator, something worth paying attention to.

David Simonton is a photographer living in Raleigh, N.C. See his work in the exhibition Landscape Sublime: Contemporary Photography through November 13.

Image: David Simonton, Reidsville, North Carolina, June 2003, 2003, printed 2004, gelatin-silver print, 9 11/16 x 9 13/16 in., Purchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art, © 2004 David Simonton

Teenagers tend to see the world a little differently—but that’s not a bad thing! A distinct point of view can be an asset to a photographer. The Museum’s recent Digital Photography Workshop encouraged high schoolers to express their creativity in a variety of media.

The workshop combined a photo shoot in the Museum Park with computer manipulation and hands-on art projects. First the teens took a look at our current photography exhibition, Landscape Sublime, and saw how North Carolina artist John Menapace transformed ordinary daily spaces into extraordinary arrangements of light and form. They took their cameras into the Park to capture worm’s-eye views of oaks covered with kudzu and the geometric angles of the amphitheater stage.

Back inside, they got their hands on computer software to manipulate photographs, distorting and enhancing their own photos for a dramatic and sometimes humorous effect. The students experimented with printing on unusual surfaces and combining photos of themselves with works of art for mixed-media projects.

They drew inspiration from Anthony Goicolea’s Sea Wall, a sculptural installation of photos, glass bottles, and glass blocks, to print photographs of each other on acetate for a group installation, which they then photographed. They looked at vanitas paintings in the Dutch collection—still lifes that symbolize the emptiness and transience of earthly things—and then created another three-dimensional installation using still-life objects. Their work graced the Blue Ridge patio for just a short time, but the images live on in students’ photographs.

We invite you to peer behind the lens for a new perspective of the Museum.

Last week five other interns and I were led through the Contemporary and African art galleries by Curators Linda Dougherty and Kinsey Katchka. Before our tour we learned about the curators’ roles in the Museum and discussed the process of selecting art and displaying it in a museum setting. The curators intrigued me with stories of weekend trips to New York and Miami for various art shows, where they scout out up-and-coming artists. They answered our many questions and then proceeded to the galleries.

It wasn’t until we stopped at several photographs that I found a piece of art that really piqued my interest. Anthony Goicolea’s Still Life with Pig (2005) is pleasantly shocking. Two young boys huddle underneath a lean-to while a decaying pig lies lifelessly on a log before them.

Upon closer inspection I noticed blue and yellow war paint on the boys’ faces. Like Tom and Huck, the boys appear to be resting from adventurous explorations of the woods surrounding them. I almost lost focus of the photo when one of the curators mentioned a little-known fact: Goicolea’s photograph is actually a fabricated image, created with the help of Photoshop and a vivid imagination.

The objects in the picture are real, but the juxtaposition of them is not. Goicolea layered photos of the various objects on his computer, meticulously placing each layer so as to confuse the viewer into thinking that somewhere, somehow, this scene might have happened. Goicolea’s picture is indeed a work of art, a creation based on fantasy and reality. But in my world, Photoshop exists on fashion magazine covers and the advertisements that go inside them, not hanging in art galleries. Goicolea’s work, perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as airbrushed starlets, had me questioning my perception of what is art.

Golden Boy is a star. In the second post of today’s triple-header, Caroline tells us about our hero’s photo shoot.

Roll out the red carpet! Bring out the spotlights!

His blue helmet hair perfectly coiffed and his bling worn proudly on his new mummy body, a rejuvenated Golden Boy poses for the camera. Click! A golden grin. Click! A twinkle in the eye. The camera loves him.

No paparazzi shots for our Golden Boy! Nothing will do but a studio portrait taken by his favourite photographers, Karen and Chris, who have been following him on his incredible journey. Golden Boy’s best shot, carefully selected by his curatorial agent, and an accompanying bio appear on pages 40-41 of the Museum’s Handbook of the Collections. Shots from this photo session will also appear in the Systematic Catalogue of the Ancient Egyptian Collection, to be published in 2011.

If you buy a copy of the Handbook (currently available at the Museum Store), he might autograph it for you . . .

Brian Ulrich, Chicago, Illinois (Cell), 2003, Chromogenic print, 
30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm), Purchased with funds from the Friends of Photography, 2008.11.1

Have you ever stood in front of a vast variety of toothpastes at the grocery store and nearly wanted to pull out your hair? Or have you experienced a feeling of exhaustion after shopping for basic necessities? I know that sometimes the overabundance of cereal options leaves me simply flummoxed. If you empathize with any (or all!) of the above scenarios, you may find Brian Ulrich’s photograph Chicago, Illinois (Cell) to be eerily familiar.

This large-scale image, from Ulrich’s Copia series, illustrates a young woman standing in a refrigerated and packaged foods area of a large grocery store, staring at an endless supply of cheese, dips, wine and vegetable trays. Brightly illuminated by uniform fluorescent bulbs so prominent in retail stores today, the scene feels clean and controlled-almost hospital-like in its sterility. Ulrich’s lens focuses squarely on the young woman–interesting considering the woman herself seems particularly unfocused and wavering. Her eyes are wide and glazed over as she contemplates her options and calls (for reinforcements? for guidance? for a familiar voice?) someone on her cell phone. Her loneliness is palpable–though she attempts to reach out to a friendly figure through her phone, she is nevertheless alienated from any other shoppers she might encounter.  It is a scene that explores the madness of innumerable choices, the odd isolation found therein, and the overwhelming urge to consume that permeates American culture today, promoting two contradictory emotions–sympathy and revulsion–in the viewer.

Photographs in Ulrich’s Copia are divided into four separate categories: Retail, Thrift, Dark Stores, and Fair. Like Chicago, Illinois (Cell), other images from Retail feature aimless shoppers absentmindedly rifling through wads of money while glancing about intensely for their next purchase. Another tongue-in-cheek photo, taken in a Las Vegas casino in 2003, takes the words “Cash and Redemption” to a different level. Like the young woman in Chicago, Illinois (Cell), these consumers are looking for something–but the physical purchase may be just the tip of the iceberg. Are they looking to buy their way into a better life? Are they searching for fulfillment? Are they looking for the safety net of a familiar brand or product to steer their lives in the “right” direction?  These photographs are especially timely and even iconic in light of our current recession and the age of massive debt. Even more chilling are photographs from Dark Stores, which highlights the remnants of these shopping arenas once they, too, become victims of the economic times or the latest upgrade to the newer, bigger, better, and glossier.

Chicago, Illinois (Cell) is currently on view in the Modern and Contemporary Galleries at NCMA. (Catch it while you can before the galleries close September 7.) You can see more of Brian Ulrich’s work at his official website,  www.notifbutwhen.com. To hear the artist speak about the Copia project, be sure to check out his interview on NPR’s The Story.