Personal Background
Glenna Gordon was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 3, 1981 and is American and still resides within America. She received her Master’s degree in print journalism from the Columbia University School of Journalism in 2006. The first time she traveled to Africa was in 2006 and since then she’s had projects on hostages of Al Qaeda and Isis, kidnapped Nigerian girls, Nigerian weddings, and Liberia after the war. She has won a total of 9 awards for being a photographer even including the World Press Award. She has had her work shown in museums in New York City, Washington D.C., Nigeria, and London. Glenna Gordon is very invested into her work as a photographer and is really willing to dive into the culture wherever she goes.
Style
Her style is to invoke actual feelings from her photography by showing the grim reality of the world we live in. She captures the raw emotions of the people that she’s photographing to make the viewer recognize it and feel it. If I could relate her work to something I’d compare it to the artpiece the American Gothic. Both do very well at displaying the subject’s emotions and feelings. She’s not a landscape photographer; she focuses more on the intimacies of everyday life.
Philosophy
Her artwork comes from the social and political aspects of the world and she focuses to show it in her work. She goes to places where people don’t have much money and shows that these people don’t need or want money because they’re happy the way their lives already are. She has a photo of a girl in Lagos dancing on the table of a train while her family members watch in joy. She captures their joy at the specific time when she takes her photos because she focuses on giving emotion in her pieces. She also shows the ingenuity that all of these people have and their own uniqueness that each set of people carry amongst themselves and what differentiates them from others.
Influences
She didn’t have much influence to pursue a photography career until she had gone to Africa for the first time in 2006. She went to Africa to visit her brother but during her time there she realized that photography would be the career for her. Sadly I didn’t discover her or her artwork till after I had done most of my projects. However I did learn from her that we should focus on the little intricacies of life and what makes them special and to capture it. She’s also shown me how photography can do so well at capturing raw emotion and instill it into whoever views the work.
This piece was hard to recreate because I just simply wasn’t able to display the same emotions as the man in the photo. I also had to do a timer to take this photo which increased the difficulty of recreating the picture she made. I chose to use this picture because I knew I had a guitar myself so I wanted to see if I’d be able to make my photo like hers. The natural lighting she had for this photo is another thing that I couldn’t do due to the time I took my photo. My LED lights don’t have the same effect or look the natural light has within her photo, it makes her photo more crisp and focused on the man holding the garage.
The vintage look the photo had was something I couldn’t replicate because none of my family photos have aged like that. The vintage feel to the photo gives more weight to the photo and mine doesn’t have the same gravitation towards the image like her piece. The family cloth was another factor that gives the photo weight because it’s clear that it’s old but has been able to stand through the testament of time and still be here just like the photo. I feel both my image and hers instill the meaning of family and being together as one even though it’s just me and my siblings in my photo. I decided to put the blanket underneath the photo to help give similarity between my photo and hers.
I chose this piece by her because of the meaning behind the photo. The empty dresses are meant to represent the girls in Nigeria being kidnapped and taken away from their families. Instead of using a dress as my symbol for a kidnapped kid I used some of my shirts from when I was younger so it could be similar. The dresses in her photo seem to be dresses for young girls so that’s why I chose some of my smaller shirts that I still have. Being able to completely demonstrate the actual pain and sorrow to the meaning of that photo would be impossible due to the severity and pain those kidnappings inflict upon the families of those young girls.
Artist Statement
It was hard choosing a select three to recreate from her collection because of all the photos she has of these groups of people being together in large groups. I picked up a few photos that stood out to me because to me I saw the meanings of the importance of family and loved ones. In the first image of the old man sitting alone with his guitar it makes me think that he truly was alone and missed his loved ones based on his facial expression being so serious even with a hint of sadness as well. In my photo I tried to resemble the same facial expression so I could build the same meaning and weight to the photo but it proved to be too difficult to capture by myself. My second and third images really show the meaning of family because in the photo of me and my siblings you could see the joy we had as a family and being together. But the third image has a more solitude meaning of family because the empty shirts are supposed to represent loved ones specifically children being taken away and no longer with us.