Sally Gail

It's interesting to me that I picked Sally Gall out of the list of photographers I have been given, because I think the glowing effect is awful. It's obvious and tacky and overdone in senior and schoolbook portraiture. And for some reason Sally Gall's photos appear to have that effect.

 
Why? Really, why? My only explanation is that this was taken before Photoshop existed and probably didn't seem really cliché. Actually, this could look kind of nice if I'd never seen anything like it before.

I couldn't find too many photos with people in them, but the ones I did find, I could tell that the photograph was not inherently about that person in the photo. It was more about the idea Gall wanted to express, and the mood she wanted to inflict upon the viewer.




 
 However, she also portraits of people, mostly families, in ordinary day to day situations. The people are generally looking at the camera and smiling  and they're sitting on beaches or nice rocks. But these are so ordinary that I don't think much of her creativity went into these photos. I feel that she did this as a means to make money and not because she was artistically inclined to make these photos.
Her strongest work is not in portraiture, but in nature.

Her most recent series is called Crawl, in color. She shoots close ups of bugs on plants, and spiderwebs. The images are so beautiful and very simple. I know these parts of nature are incredibly easy to come by and yet she has made each unique.