Tina Barney Micheal Stipe

After visiting the CAM, I decided to focus my analysis on a piece by Tina Barney called "Micheal Stipe, Room 100, 2008." In order to do a proper analysis on this piece I did a bit of research on Tina Barney. I found that she established herself as a photographer by taking portraits of very rich Americans in their home environments. She had an uncanny ability to capture great color sense and great detail. Her photographs are also very insightful to the lives of the people that she photographed.

In the photograph that I am analyzing, "Micheal Stipe, Room 100, 2008", you can see a man sitting on the very corner seat of a couch. The man in the photograph has dog on his lap and looks to be cleaning his glasses. He has one eye closed and the other one looking at his glasses. He looks like he is there just hanging out. If you look at his clothing he is dressed in a formal suit and tie and look like he is going somewhere or just got home from somewhere. Having the dog in the picture makes the setting have a homier feel to it.

The angle toward which she took the photograph makes it have like a flậneur type gaze to it, like you just glanced over at him and this is what he was doing, or you were just having a casual conversation and you just snapped a photo of him. I also think that the photograph has a good sense of line coming from the black line crossing the photograph behind him and the line of the top of the couch. The linear type perspective in the photograph makes you look at him as the focal point and follow all the way through the photograph using those lines as a guide. She also has a sense of using a sort of monochromatic scheme to this photograph. The only colors I see are blacks, whites, and browns. The framing of the photograph gives it a very casual feel. You can also tell that when she was taking this particular photograph she kept the rule of thirds in mind and framed him more towards the upper left side of the photograph to balance it out.

Over all this photograph oozes casual and nonchalant. Flậneur gaze has a very big part in making this photograph so casual. The photographer, Tina Barney does a great job composing this photograph and I really enjoyed analyzing her work.

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