Juha Ylitalo

In the beginning there was 99 of them. We started secound round from 95th and counted down to 91st. After first nine photographers, I spent quite bit time on other ventures, but here is quick summary from next five portfolios in our countdown of 99 Remarkable Photographer’s Portfolios.

90. Zach Gold

I liked the photographs in Motion and Commission categories. Motion had powerful images about urban life. Commission on the other hand had much lighter mood, but that was to be expected since they appearantly were taken for advertisements..
Fashion and Personal categories didn’t create any real impact on me. This combined with the fact that I didn’t like how Flash(?) based navigation worked drops Zach out of top 3.

89. Kimm Saatvedt

When I saw the name and URL, I got excited because here we had photographer from Nordic country. After all this excitement, I was quite disappointed, when I ended up with photographer, which shows man standing by his car in parking lot. I must have missed something, because this can’t be all of it, but …

88. Colo Rise

Cole’s site looks nice and simple, except that ‘browse’ and ’slideshow’ links don’t work and if you accidently press ‘connect’ there is no ‘cancel’ button for getting back. Once you’ve got past this and you start clicking photographs to get next one, you will notice that area around mouse cursor is always darker than what it should be. I would have liked to see more photographs and less “bells and whistles”.

87. Clayton Cubitt

After having problems with first three photographers sites on this set of five photogrpahers, navigation in Clayton’s site was very nice and simple. Clayton has divided his portfolios to art and work. Art section has albums, which he has classified as ‘Some images on this body of work are suitable for mature audiences only. If you are under 21, or easially offended, do not continue.’.
His portfolios under work category on the other hand show interesting mixture of photogprahs. It has photographs from Lagos, Nigeria and Katherine victims and at the sametime he also has collection of fashion photographs.

86. Richard Avedon

Richard Averon is likely to be first photographer in our list of 99 photographer, who is no longer with us. Even though he won’t be shooting new material, he has huge collection of photographs from 60 years as photographer. Since we are trying to look portfolios, we are going to ignore most of them and simply jump to archives and check four portfolios: Jacob Israel Avedon, The Family, In the American West and Democracy.

• Jacob Israel Avedon is album about last seven years of Richard’s father and as such its hard to put under any kind of evaluation.
• Family was commissioned work for Rolling Stones magazine in 1976. It has 69 photographs about power-elite in USA at that time. Subjects were allowed to choose their own clothing and posture and as such this portfolio probably has lot of historical value, but it didn’t raise any strong emotions on me.
• In the American West and Democracy, which was left unfinished after his death, were most enjoyable. They have interesting photographs about people with different kind of backgrounds. I really like these two portfolios.

After going through 99 Remarkable Photographer’s Portfolio list from 86th to 99th, my personal top three is following:
1st John Hyde (from position 97 in original list)
2nd Richard Avelon (from position 86 in original)
3rd Gregory Colbert (from position 99 in original list)

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We started with 99 Photograher’s Portfolios and we still have 95 to go. As added bonus material, I will also add my three favorites among those that we’ve so far reviewed.

95. Khristopher Grunert

My first impression from Kristopher Grunert’s portfolio was very negative, because front page boldly reads:

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digital Photography School published 99 Remarkable Photographer’s Portfolios. I’ve tried to go through them all once or twice, but something always interrupts my photo watching session. I finally decided that I have to digest them in smaller groups. Nice thing about this approach is that I get opportunity to write whole serie of posts.

Since this is countdown, we will start from number 99 and eventually finish at number one.

99. Gregory Colbert

Gregory’s Ashes and Snow expedition shows collection of sepia toned images, which all have woman, child, both or group of them (mostly just one child) interacting with single animal or group of animals (birds, cheetah, elephant, lynx (?), orangutans, whales, …). All unnecessary elements have been removed from photographs. Photos have very recognizable style in them.

I personally like these images a lot, but at the sametime they are presenting something that I can’t easily add into my own portfolio, since the style is so far away from my “world”.

98. Grant Hamilton

Grant Hamilton has large collection of polaroid images, where the big thing is textures and patterns. For me, the most interesting aspect on these images was to look for small details, which gave me hints, where Grant has taken that particular photograph.

97. John Hyde

John Hyde is my favorite photographer among those, whose portfolio’s I will go through in this post. He has magnificent collection of photographs about eagles, whales, etc. I was trying to find more information about his work methods, but his biography doesn’t reveal whole lot about that.

If I would have to find something negative to say about John’s portfolio, there are probably too many photographs in portfolio (15 portfolios, 32 photographs each …). To provide examples, where I would cut down number of images, first 32 images about Eagles have seven images, where eagle is diving for fish with its claws in front of it.

96. Sam Bassett

Sam Bassett seems to be fond of portraits. His portfolio has 20 portraits (and even I can recognize couple names and faces: Willie and Annie Nelson and Donald Trump). All these portraits are trying to be some sort of parody about subjects public image.

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