Image via Complex Original
Oh how we miss the days of Kanye West's KanyeUniverseCity blog. It existed from August 2007 to May 2010 and usually had around five posts a day showing everything Kanye loves in fashion, music, art, architecture, gadgets, cars, and beyond. While the KanyeWest.com blog was around for a litle while afterward, now Kanye seems less focused on keeping a blog going as he is working on huge projects, whether it be designing for the runways in Paris or making a film with Bret Easton Ellis. For some, KanyeUniverseCity was a much-needed intro to art, including photography. Enjoy these 15 Photographers We Discovered on the KanyeUniverseCity Blog.
RELATED: 15 Artists We Discovered Thanks to Kanye West's Old Blog
Asger Carlsen
Date posted: August 3, 2009
Asger Carlsen is a successful Danish commercial photographer, who started out shooting crime scenes when he was 16 years old. Using digital manipulation, he found a unique way to add extra eyes to the faces of his subjects and contort their bodies ever so slightly, which became his style. His work may be a little creepy, but it's still thought-provoking and definitely fits in with fine art's explorations of the human body.
Robert Longo
Date posted: October 31, 2007
Robert Longo's famous images of bodies soaring through the air, a technique he refined using trampolines, white backgrounds, and a fast shutter speed, were famously on the walls of Patrick Bateman's apartment in American Psycho. Kanye loved what he saw at DTR Modern Galleries and shared a ton of pics. With Kanye's recent homage to the film, which Bret Easton Ellis also wrote, it seems like things certainly have come full circle.
Richard Burbridge
Date posted: June 21, 2009
Richard Burbridge is one of the greatest fashion photographers alive. Kanye posted the mask series he did for Livraison Magazine, which is a good introduction to the kind of sharp, monochrome work he's since done for Italian Vogue and Dazed and Confused (including their February 2013 Thom Yorke cover).
Kim Holtermand
Date posted: July 9, 2009
Kim Holtermand is a top Danish architecture and landscape photographer who has had a successful commercial and fine art career while also working as a fingerprints expert in the Crime Scene Unit of The Danish National Police. He was born into a creative family and has quite the exciting three-part life.
Website
Daryl Banks
Date posted: July 4, 2009
Canadian photographer Daryl Banks' career spans fashion, advertising, and fine art. His "Crinoline Flowers" series blew up on blogs, including Kanye's for being such a simple yet effective articulation of the human body as a flower. 'Ye was known for posting many photo series of hot women, but this one is more artful and hasn't been duplicated.
Kenji Aoki
Date posted: July 21, 2009
Kenji Aoki's still life photographs are something else. He makes objects look even better than they do in reality, giving life to lifeless objects like lamps, paper, plates, and benches. Maybe Kanye even got his Le Corbusier lamp obsession from looking at the work of the great Kenji.
Daido Moriyama
Date posted: July 29, 2009
Daido's images reveal a dark side of urban life, one filled with agression, speed, and sex. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, Daido began to unveil the underbelly of the city, showing Japan's shift from traditional values after WWII. His work reminds us of an Asian version of film noir.
Li Wei
Date posted: August 29, 2009
Beijing-born Li Wei rose to fame in 2002 with his "Falls" series, a set of images where he photographed himself upside down with his head in the ground. He continued to blow up across the Internet when he released images of people flying and floating in impossible situations. The artist looks at the staging of his works as a performance piece. Although the photos may look Photoshopped, Wei actually uses wires and scaffolding to get the perfect shot.
Rick DeMint
Date posted: October 9, 2009
Rick DeMint invented the Portroid, a Polaroid image that people have to sign-off on. He captures people in transit, celebrities on the road in rare images that are somewhere between paparazzi shots and somewhere between Wharhol's Polaroids.
Tom Hoops
Date posted: September 7, 2009
Tom Hoops' grainy portaits seem to show every line on a person's face. His images make us want to reach out and touch the skin depicted. A photojournalist at heart, Hoops takes us around the world with his unforgettable images.
Mads Teglers
Date posted: October 25, 2009
Teglers' fashion photographs aren't overpowered by props and graphics, and insead the Danish photographer lets his subjects speak for themselves. In all of his images, he seems to draw out the model's personality even when the clothing seems overpowering.
Erwin Olaf
Date posted: November 15, 2009
Dutch photographer Olaf has worked with everyone from Levi's to Nokia. For a commerical photographer, he is sure daring. His images are shocking and often uncomfortable, like his series "Royal Blood" that features pure white people (almost like albinos) bleeding from flesh wounds.
Guido Argentini
Date posted: November 27, 2009
Argentini's erotic images will have no difficulty turning you on, but the works are more than just cheap porn. His perfectly-composed photographs balance in-your-face sexuality with unusual poses—like a woman falling out of a bathtub or squatting on the ground—that soften the impact of the images.
Ren Rox
Date posted: November 29, 2009
London-based photographer Ren Rox uses multiple explosures and blurry filters to capture high fashion portraits. Her subjects, often surrounded by fuzzy backgrounds, look like they are emerging from a dream or memory. Her black and white portraits show a talented play with shadows, while her colorful images, like the ones of Michel Jackson, are a psychadelic dream.
Keffer
Date posted: October 15, 2009
Keffer, also known as The Night Day, has been documenting the nightlife in Paris for many years, showing what goes on in the world's sexiest city after dark. All of his images are in high-contrast black and white, and they each have a name signifying the series as whole. Kanye posted images from the "Autumn," "First Time," "South Clock," and "Two Five JacksonLoser" series, which encompass the craziness that happens at every party Keffer documents.
