Practical Brief - Example Inspirational Photographs and Final Images

Eugene Atget

Example Photograph:

This photograph is from Atget's series of work 'Saint Cloud' taken between 1919 and 1921. I chose it because I think that it represents this body of work well, and it is typical photograph of Atget's, with the colouring, contrast, format and subject matter. I wanted to try and replicate Atge's photographic style, in particular the central framing, sepia colouring and subject matter. I went to Temple Newsam for this photograph, as I knew there would be trees there with high roots, but whilst there I found this fountain and seized the oppertunity to photograph it. I was really happy with the result.

My Photograph:

Alexander Rodchenko

Rodchenko's photography is almost always shot at extreme angles, never vertical, and usually this is to try and represent the scale of his subject. I looked at his work on buildings, noticing the key similarities between the images. There was usually people present in the image to emphasise on the scale, however, on some of the images like the one below they are not included. The photographs are all obviously film, black and white usually with a fairly high contrast. I wanted to photograph a building in a similar way to this, and so I again went to temple newsam and photographed the house there, as it is a historical building, and I thought that the best way to simulate Rodchenko's style would be to really try match the subject matter.

Example Photograph: 

My Photograph:

Rinko Kawauchi

As I found out from my initial research of Rinko Kawauchi, she tends to photograph around 3 key elements - life, death and nature. She uses medium format square film, in colour, and often uses pastel colours. I wanted to focus on 2 of the 3 elements - life and nature. I photographed my cat's ear because I knew that Kawauchi often photographed a section of a body or animal, and not the whole figure, and I made the depth of field very deep so that the background was blurred, and you could only recognise the colour. I then just desaturated my image in order to try and get those pastel colours, and increased the photograph's brightness slightly as well to help emphasise this. I then finally cropped the photograph into a square format to follow suit. I am really happy with the result of this image.

Example Photograph:

My Photograph:

Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama almost always uses black and white film, with an extremely high contrast, sometimes so high you cannot make certain areas of the photograph out. He has a very strange method of photography in which he does not usually compose an image, but simply goes around with a small point and shoot 35mm camera, and takes snapshots of what he sees. I decided the best way to go about photographing in the style of Moriyama would be to do as he does, and go out with a camera snapping away. I came out with the photograph of tree branches infront of a bright lighting, and thought that this would work well for Moriyama, as the street light makes the lighting of the image unequal, perfect for increasing the contrast of the photograph to make the whites really white and the blacks of the photograph really black. I also used a slow shutter speed in order to emphasise on the snap shot aesthetic.

Example Photograph:

My Photograph:

Practical Brief - Initial Research

For the practical side of our Context of Practice brief, we were assigned to investigate into photographer's style. We were then told to choose 4 photographers from a list, 2 historical and 2 contemporary and then try to capture a photograph using their individual styles and techniques.
I decided to for my contemporary photographers to use Rinko Kawauchi and Daido Moriyama. And for my historical photographers I decided on Alexander Rodchenko and Eugene Atget.
Here are some examples of their work that demonstrate their photographic style and techniques:

Rinko Kawauchi - 

Rinko Kawauchi uses a very muted colour pallet for her photography work, often focusing on her favourite colour blue. She uses 6x6 colour film, and is really interested in capturing life and death often through nature. I really like the calm and un-cluttered effect of her photographs, and think that each one is individual and aesthetically pleasing.


Daido Moriyama - 

Daido Moriyama uses 35mm black and white film usually with an extremely high contrast and under exposes his photographs. He usually just snaps and goes, not really planning out the composition of a photograph before taking it. He sometimes captures movement in the subjects of his photography, and often just goes about photographing street.


Alexander Rodchenko - 

One of Rodchenko's main traits in almost all his photographs is his peculiar use of strange angles. It is because of this that his photographs are all so different to similar ones from this time. I think that the angles really enhance the photographs and make them stand out. 


Eugene Atget - 

Eugene Atget often used 35mm film, and either black and white or sepia colouring, and the subjects of his photographs were usually either buildings or objects in the street, rarely if ever portraits. I really like his work and hope I can recreate his style accordingly.

New Topographics Session

During this session, we looked at a photographic group who were called the 'New Topographics'. They were formed in 1975, and were a group of 168 artistic works made by 10 photographers. As a group, their photographic subjects were man-altered landscapes, and they each had a singular photographic style, making their work a range of different techniques and personal styles. Here is the list of the photographers, some information into their subjects and photographs and an example of one of their photographs:

Robert Adams - He photographed man made structures on grassy landscapes, showing how man has infiltrated nature, and overtaken it with their technology and structures. His photographs are quiet, with a straight-forward style.

Lewis Baltz - Photographed industrial parks, really taking into account the aesthetic considerations whilst shooting. His photographs are all composed nicely, making them have a really specific and recognizable quality. 

Berdt and Hilla Becher - Photographed using typology techniques (photographing the same thing from different angles). They used non-descript lighting, making the photograph look flat, with little shadows.

Joe Deal - He took his photographs from a high angle, with little or no sky shown in the image, and he portrayed a compositional balance between landscape and structures.

Frank Gohlke - He photographed landscapes that appear empty, deserted with little to no people. From a photographers viewpoint.

Nicholas Nixon - His photographs seem to be very 'in your face', with the city taking over the photograph. People are shown at a very small scale, and the city landscapes are shown to be very busy.

John Schott - Photographed motels and typology, and his photographs were not necessarily consistent, in the fact that they all look so different and unique. 

Steven Shore - He was one of the only photographers in the group to shoot using colour, and also shoot on 10x8 film too. There are no people shown in his images, and they appear to be very bland and mundane. They all have a similar yellow brown colour in them too.

Henry Wessel Jr. - He did not include people in his photographs either, possible to draw away any distractions to the structures, which are the main subject of the group. His photographs, like with Shore's were bleak and mundane.

To sum up, the key features which can be found in the works of the New Topographics group are mundane and bleak photographs of man altered landscapes, carefully composed images, black and white the majority of the time and little or no people.

Surveyors and Surveyed

In the Victorian days, photographs were respected and accepted as a method of showing the truth and showing that which you may not have seen before. A lot of photographers documented the poor and needy, which were then seen by the rich, and this was a method of spreading awareness of their conditions. It was accepted because photographs at the time were extremely factual. It was used to cover a wide range of topics and document changes throughout the environment.

    ''It established itself as part of a tradition of enquiry about health, housing, education,
     economic condition and moral state of the poor.''
     (Wells, 2001:75)

She also mentions that the only reason photographs were regarded as factual and trustworthy was they reinforced stories and reports from the news so that people could see them for themselves. It was stated in Liz Wells book that these enquiries were from a range of different sources, meaning photography was used fairly regularly.

    ''The camera reinforced journalistic and literary accounts of aspects of social life that
     had rarely been seen or experienced by middle-class people. Enquiries emanated from
     government departments, newspapers, independent scholars, medical practitioners,
     religious leaders and philanthropic bodies.''
     (Wells, 2001:75)
     

The High Point of Modernism

The high point of modernism was around the 1930's. This was around the same time when Modernism movements such as the Bauhaus, Constructivism and Dada were at the peak of their.
Constructivism was produced after the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was an Architectural and Artistic movement, which emphasized art as a practice for social purposes. It was also reflected in most artistic fields, not limiting it's power.
There are many key features found in work from Modernism, including Black and White photography and art, the use of geometric shapes, 2 dimensional picture planes, the use of text in an image or piece of art, the re-use of found images and posters/ graphic design.
One artist who did work during this time was John Heartfield, who was a Dada supporter, meaning he made art that objects to war. One of his most famous pieces was 'Adolf the superman swallows gold and spouts shit'. This image showed a picture of Adolf Hitler with a swastika as his heart and coins as his bones. This was making an objection to how Hitler was funding with reference to another key feature of modernism - celebrating technology, with the use of the x-ray style image.

Another artist who worked during the Modernist period was Alexander Rodchenko. In 1921 he exhibited 3 monochrome paintings titles 'The end of painting'. This was typical of Modernism, because he's celebrating technology and making us appreciate technology in the modern world.

Harvard Referencing

During this session, we studied Harvard Referencing, as it is a method that will be required for writing our Context Of Practice essay in the near future. Here are some examples of the skills we learnt during this time, put to practice using Mary Warner Marien's book as the source of referencing:

As Mary Warner Marien once said ''Forbidden sensuality and sexuality were frequent Surrealist topics.'' (Warner Marien, 2010: 254)

'Forbidden sensuality and sexuality were frequent Surrealist topics.'
Warner Marien, Mary, (2010), Photography: A Cultural History, London, Lawrence King

Postmodernism

Postmodernism began in the 1960’s and is still present today. The key features of postmodernism are pastiche (combining different things together, also known as bricollage), Kitsch (bad taste art), Chaos, lack of an original (where the artist would simply re-do an original piece, eg. Banksy with the tin can piece), the breaking of rules and tradition, and a refusal of narrative. ’The Postmodern is not concerned with the aura of authenticity.’

An image which is typical of postmodern features is one by Yasuma Marimura, and is a copied photograph of the original by Cindy Sherman’s untitled photograph of a girl on the floor. This is typical of postmodernism as it lacks an original, it is simply someone else’s idea re-done in the same style, and it’s definitely kitsch because it is of a man on the floor instead of a woman, making it tacky. 

Original Image by Cindy Sherman

Copied Image by Yasumasa Morimura

The very image its-self is not exactly perfect in the fact that it doesn’t exactly resemble the original. The colouring is very different along with the position of the subject in the image. Liz Wells worded this well in her book Photography: A critical Introduction when she wrote ‘… we inhabit a world of dislocated signs, a world in which the appearance of things has been separated from authentic originals.’