Ari Marcopoulos
Ari Marcolpoulos has been an inspiration to me for many years. When I first found his work, it was a time when I was trying to figure myself out as a photographer and what it was that I wanted to show to the world. I was experimenting with just carrying a 35mm around with me at all times. I would take photos of me and my friends hanging out in my parents house, and at parties. It was before we were all 21 and I wanted to document my life in general. I wanted to let everyone know what I was experiencing in my adolescence. Marcolpolous helped me find reasoning behind my work. His work is that of underground lifestyles. He immerses himself in the personalities of the individuals he shoots. It has a very "snapshotty" aesthetic that I've grown to respect and understand in contemporary photographers. Definitely check him out if you don't know his work.
Amy Stein
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I've been looking at the photographer Amy Stein for inspiration. The statements she makes about her work explore and touches on what I have recently been photographing. When examining my own work and why it is that I take a lot of photographs of animals, she's a great artist to look at. I can relate to what she is talking about, and she has understanding of the human emotions that are drawn from domestication and relationships humans have with animals. She bases a lot of her work from real life events she finds in newspapers and such.
"Within these scenes I explore our paradoxical relationship with the "wild" and how our conflicting impulses continue to evolve and alter the behavior of both humans and animals. We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature. Within my work I examine the primal issues of comfort and fear, dependence and determination, submission and dominance that play out in the physical and psychological encounters between man and the natural world. Increasingly, these encounters take place within the artificial ecotones we have constructed that act as both passage and barrier between domestic space and the wild."
-Amy Stein
Amy Stein Photography
