Week 3 Research Assignment - Reagan Franzoni

The artist I chose for week 3 from the Museum of Computer Art is Sheila Smith. She is a photographer and digital artist. She studied the concept of advertising and design at the School of Visual Arts before becoming an art director. Before that, she worked with the director of Columbia Records to review some of the best photographers of the sixties portfolios to select some of their work for assignments. Throughout her journey in school, she took courses in photography, drawing, and painting. Today, she is entirely devoted to digital photography. She photographs a wide variety of subjects, such as the streets of New York City, cities in Europe, flowers, still life, children, and dancers. She enhances these photos using Photoshop, which adds a more creative experience to the images. She takes pictures of a particular setting or paints a collage and places them onto the computer to create new images from the original ones she made with new designs and filters in Photoshop. Smith becomes inspired by art in the streets of cities she travels to and what she observes from people’s ‘home turfs.’ In her photographs, she captures moments about people’s lives and candids of crowds on beaches and rail stations. Her work looks at how we observe the world around us and the people living in it. 

The image I chose from Smith's photo-based digital art portfolio at the MOCA is of a candid shot from what looks like the streets of New York City. The picture looks like it could be an original photograph she shot, edited in Photoshop using a brush technique to give it a paint brush texture. It seems as if she could have used some Photoshop filters such as oil paint. It also looks like she may have used Photoshop to enhance some of the lighting and colors in the photograph to make it stand out more. I chose this photo because I like the vibrancy of the images colors and I like the way the texture of the picture almost distorts the photograph, but enough to still make out what the image is about. The point behind this image is to observe the constant movement of a city. People are constantly moving and are on the go in the city, and this image captures how the artist did not stop to take a photo. They took a candid view of people not paying attention and continuing their movements.

Link to Sheila Smith Website -

https://www.sheilasmithimages.com/content.html?page=6

Image -