AC Students at Library

There is a great exhibition of photographs by AC students currently on display at the Downtown Branch, of the Amarillo Public Library. The show was juried by the photographer and historian, Cindy Wallace, and there will be a reception this Thursday from 6:30-7:30. This is a great sampling of what our students are doing in the program, and I can not wait until the party!

Downtown Branch, of the Amarillo Public Library, 413 E 4th, 806-378-3054.

Image credit: Amy Yearwood

Student Blogging

A student post from the Discussion Boards this week in History of Photography. I love teaching!

I had heard the name Hans Bellmer in passing. When he was mentioned during the lecture it pinged my memory but I couldn't bring forth where I had seen it before. While Googling various topics tonight, I decided to look him up and see why he seemed so familiar and almost fell out of my chair. You see, I collect dolls- specifically ball jointed dolls - for photography purposes. In fact, ball jointed dolls are what first got me interested in photography; I bought my first digital camera on the same day that my first doll arrived in the mail because one of the main ways people participate in it is by taking pictures of them. Hans Bellmer is credited as one of the forerunners of the modern BJD hobby, he made his own ball jointed dolls and photographed them in his surreal images. I had thought that strange bright 4 legged female form in the image shown during lecture looked like it had joints like one of my dolls, but had assumed at the time that was just a side effect of compositing or whatever he had done to create the image- I had no idea he made it himself. Wow. Cool thing- there are some major esthetic differences between French dollmakers and ones from other countries like Japan and Korea, now I can see from looking at Bellmer's work that the French artists are being heavily influenced by him in the construction of their dolls.

Here's a link showing some of Bellmer's doll photography.

Link to Bellmer's Wiki page, showing a drawing he made of a doll. I instantly recognized it as a ball jointed doll.

Link to BJD Collectasy article about Nefer Kane's dolls, which strongly remind me of Bellmer's Scroll to the bottom to see the images.

There's also a wikipedia article about modern BJD but I'm not linking it here. Even though it's pretty much the only easily reached page that describes the dolls to the uninitiated, it's poorly written and out of date. you can go look it up yourself if curious.