Daniel Stier

During Daniel Stier's lecture, I always struggled to gain interest in his work, as I found all the work that he showed us appeared to be incredibly dull to me. With his work, he has a focus on the simplicity within his work, which I can admire, but I struggle to get interested in it.

The first project he showed us was based on supermarkets and marketting. This consists of a series of general household products and foods that he's photographed, sometimes with a special offer on the products. I don't really understand the meaning behind these images, it might have something to do with simple marketing and the way things are presented to us, but I didn't really get it.

The next project he showed us was based around astronauts, where he took a series of photos of astronauts, various parts of NASA and the families and houses of astronauts. I found this much more interesting, but I thought the photos didn't seem to flow well as a series. As he has such a large range of things to take photos of, the series seemed disjointed and odd. There would be shots of large technical equipment, next to a photo of a small girl stood outside her house, which seemed to look really odd to me.

The final project that he told us about I found the most interesting, where he has taken a series of photos of people who are immigrants living in the UK, and got them to wear clothes stereotypical native to their countries. I thought this was an interesting project to show the diversity of cultures in our country and I like the natural way the photos were shot.

He finished by showing us a few commercial portraits that he's done in the past. I liked the interesting choices of location in his images, but didn't find anything particarly striking about the actual portraits. They seemed very natural which I liked, but at times I thought the composition looked a bit lazy, and the image only really seemed interesting because of the person in it.

All in all, Daniel Stier is a very simplistic photographer, and while I can appreciate the work he creates, I don't feel like I can really admire it.