During my visit to MOPA and San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park, I viewed images from Ansel Adams, Jo Whaley, the Baja California Series, and Aerial Photos. Here is a recollection of my thoughts and ideas.
MOPA:
Ansel Adams – Of course Ansel always impresses the world with his true sense of vision. Its not what the image reflects to the audience but what stages of the process reflects from within. Not only did I enjoy looking at each image in depth, I liked the video inclusion that showed Ansel’s development process, the work he puts in, and the commentary of passion. In addition, he anticipated the digital era of photography and talks about how he knew this day and age would prosper. I also loved when he talked of his friends who tried to translate his images, but to him their translations were much different than what he imagined. I don’t have one favorite photo from his collection, but I really like how he uses dark shadows and reflections of white details, the specificity of the image, which draw me into what the image means for me.
Jo Whaley – I like the way Jo Whaley incorporates her artistic talents of painting and sculpting as a backdrop for her photographs. She stages insects upon these backdrops cultivating a new environment from their true existence and reality. Each image brings the insects to life offering enhancing colors and illuminating affects of the imagination. Every detail within insects come alive where it becomes part of the message, meaning, and translation: images scaled to specific lines of symmetry like wings of a butterfly align with a weathered piece of drift wood, the white feather-like texture of the butterfly’s wings represent the age of the image; the striped butterfly intensifies the pattern within the backdrop; the use of lighting and color to reflect the beetle’s characteristics. These were some of my favorite images that I viewed and speak about in this blog write-up:
Picturing the Process: Photographs as Witness – These selection of images portrayed real life stories of the innocence, aging, termoils, excitement, and beauty. One of my favorite pieces within this gallery selection was a book by Nicholas Nixon titled Brown Sisters that showcased images of four sisters taken over a span of 30 years. Each image represents the sisters standing in the same position from the when the first photo was taken. It was interesting to flip through each page to see the many changes occurring through time: aging, hairstyles, clothing, etc. It was as if their personalities and identities became familiar to the audience.
1984 
2004
San Diego Natural History Museum:
Baja California – Ralph Lee Hopkins does an amazing job bringing the natural beauty of Baja into a bird’s eye perspective: of color, culture and amazement. Each image comes alive offering unique tastes of individual interests and purpose for traveling to such ground. One of my favorite images is the Baja Cactus by Hopkins, which reflects lighting techniques in combination with clouds in motion; two worlds colliding to make an amazing photograph.
