Brendan Austin is an architectural and landscape photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. In his series of work 'Paper Mountains', Austin creates images which closely imitate moutain scenes but are made from crumpled paper. He gains inspiration from existing photographs taken on his journeys through the scenery of the US, then re-constructs them using paper which is folded to create shadows and texture. Austin wants us to consider the creation of an alternate world and the use of humble materials made to carry an important message.
Austin is also considering the human impact on nature. This is shown by his maticulous re-imaginings of natural wonders which result in images with recognisable landscapes alongside a sense of artifice. Austin was interested in photographing on this issue as a response to what he had seen on his travels. He describes 'the isolated desert city running on oil generators, the mars like landscapes of a volanic environment and the mountains made from paper all attempt to start a conversation concerning the loss of meaning and reality'. This refers to another of Austin's interests. He has continually re-worked and then re-photographed his paper mountains numerous times. This causes the mountains to slowly discard their originial texture and surface. Here, Austin is questioning the truth in photographic reproduction, the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, and referencing his ultimate aim to build a story of an alternate nature. |
Francis Bruguiere was an American photographer, painter and sculptor interested in the experimental. Bruguiere creates mystical images by cutting up pieces of paper and twisting them, creating a kind of inter-woven sculpture which looks at once strange and tortured as it does hopeful. He wants us to consider the elevation of something so plain into a work of visual mastery.
Bruguiere was an early photographer to experiment with the concept of abstraction in photography, a medium so arguably grounded in visible reality. He used a single lamp to highlight different areas of light and shadow within the papers. He was interested in achieving this reaction in the audience of initially being confused as to what they are looking at, relating to his contributions to the American avant-garde photography movement. Furthermore, Bruguiere uses different angles of lighting and interesting shapes in creating this series of paper-based abstractions, in which the dramatic lighting pierces the graceful curves. This supports Bruguiere's journey into investigating the aesthetic possibilities of photography. |
Weston is considering the achievement of a biomorphic interpretation in 'Pepper No.30', an artwork which finds connections to nature's internal rhythms. This is shown by the fact that he used a soft chiaroscuro effect to dramatise this image. He also created his own pinhole camera which created an aperture equivalent f240, as he found that f64 was inadequate for what he wanted to achieve. This helped him to properly capture the form of the pepper, showcasing its internal twists and turns which almost reference the skin and muscular tension.
Weston also placed the pepper in a tin funnel to bring out its contours and used an interesting angle of view. Both of these techniques emphasised the pepper's three-dimensional form rather than the flat image. Weston's framing of the pepper tight to the edge of the print means that the form is enclosed in a tight spatial recess. This gives the effect that the form is emerging with pent-up energy, reflecting the energy of its previous growth process. Overall, Weston's photos form a personal statement as he elevated a commonplace to the extraordinary. |
'Pepper No. 30' was one of several peppers that Weston photographed in the series. It is a gelatin silver print dimensions (19.1cm) x (24.1cm) as is on of 60 different versions.
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1) Aperture Selector: to set the aperture (on Manual mode), hold down this button and turn the main dial to the preferred aperture.
2) Exposure Compensation: used to alter the standard exposure set by the camera.
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I could also consider the work of Imogen Cunningham.
She created close-up studies of plants and flowers which emphasise the detail and form of the objects. Through this, she wanted to project a new modernist aesthetic, based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects. Cunningham's images are a striking study into abstract form, but manage to hold onto the sense of vitality of nature. This expresses her participation in the f64 group whose images were characterised by sharp focus and careful framing, seen through a particularly Western viewpoint. |
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"I photograph the human body, the microcosm, its’ fragments: hair, scars, texture of skin, wrinkles. I am interested in individual particularities; I look for distinguishing features and irregularities. Imperfections are my favourites.”
“I photograph nature , the macrocosm, surface of water, grass, tree bark, dry leaves. I combine the two images, looking for converging lines, textures, similarities in layout and analogies in composition between the microcosm and the macrocosm. I look for unity between the human body and the nature.” |
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Brodowicz is a photographer from Poland. Her project of 'Visual Exercises' centres around the unique relationship with humanity and the natural environment. Brodowicz believes that, through highlighting the irregularity and imperfection of the human body, we can make it perfect once more. The alignment of compositional features between the body and nature in her works is an analogy which criticises our estrangment from nature, supporting her belief that reconnection with nature prevents the abuse of the environment and the body.
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Lepka is a 26 year old photographer based in Cracow.
Lepka is also interested in the relation between nature and the human being. Through mirroring texture and structure with nature, a certain tension in created between these close-up similarities. Veins are put into relation with topographic maps, fingerprints resemble a tree trunk, and cacti are compared to scrubby beards. This supports her idea of forging links between the human and nature by elevating details which, at first glance, could look ordinary. |
'Human vs. Nature'
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Jacobson creates images in which faces are difficult to discern. He does this by using a 'defocused' and monochromatic style, in which faces are rendered down to areas of tone, colour and form. He wants us to consider the futility of trying to capture human likeness in memory of portraiture. Through the lack of detail, Jacobson is denying representations of physicality, referencing the qualities of memories, dreams and how the mind retains only fragments of information.
Each photograph depicts a man’s face, its edges and features blurred and softened in a painterly style that reflected Jacobson’s preoccupation with loss and mortality in the early 1990s; themes closely tied to his observations of the AIDS epidemic. Jacobson has stated that he is open to different reactions from viewers of his work who always seem to come out with different interpretations, one being 'a doctor who said that they only reminded her of her patients who were dying of AIDS'. In response, Jacobson said, 'I think they were both right, as my work usually combines elements of beauty and melancholy'. Jacobson is also considering the 'layers of time' that photographs can reveal, and their ability to transport the viewer back to the moment of their making, when it was 'current'. He was inspired by early twentieth-century anonymous snapshots from flea markets, which he collected during the 1980s. These snapshots contained people from another time, reflecting how 'every photograph is a dead moment'. In technical terms, the people in these snapshots were often blurred or obscured in some way, so the technique of de-focusing became 'a parallel for the passage of time, illness, or death' for Jacobson. |
Erwin Blumfeld was born in Germany but emigrated to the USA in 1941, where he was to become an extremely successful and well-paid fashion photographer. He lived in New York, documenting the fashion that came with the post-war prosperity of America during the 1940s and 50s. His unique voice and vision as a photographer defined how we see the 40s and 50s now.
Blumfeld worked for Hapar's Bazaar, Life and Vogue magazines, and so was immersed in the world of fashion and modelling. He has said that one of his techniques when shooting models was to ask them 'will you marry me?' to soften their faces. Through his willingness to break the rules and conventions, he opened up the field of photography. He has been credited with the reinvention of the fashion shoot through his understanding that it was about creating icons. His fashion photography could be seen in another light - as being permeated with a sense of yearning, his unique obsession with women and the subsequent idea of striving for his 'ideal woman'. However, Blumfeld was also concerned with delving beneath the surface in what he called 'psychological portraiture', centred around his confrontation with the relationship between identity and aesthetics. His most memorable of these portraits is arguably himself, the subject of which he had the most complex relationship with. He has said that 'without a mirror, I would never have become a human being', showing how he thinks of the focus on self-image as integral to forming an identity, rather than narcissistic. He often photographed himself with masks, paper bags, screens or used photographic masking. This reflects his use of the self-portrait to battle out things that he could not when working for commercial clients, exploring the complexity of identity in a raw and vulnerable way. |
To obtain the de-focused effect of the figure receding into a white background, I used aperture bracketing to over-expose the images as well as manual focus to over-ride the lens focusing. I found that this was successful, especially after being augmented by my editing to increase certain lightness levels. I found that the photos managed to convey some emotion, inner termoil, or 'melancholy' to use Jacobson's words, through the subdued tones and the subject's expressions, which fit with my aim.
To build on my work, I looked at Jacobson's series 'Song of Sentient Beings' and 'Thought Series' to find inspiration and to add a further element of abstraction to the portraits. |
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Johnny Kerr is a self-taught American fine art photographer based in Phoenix. Kerr is principally concerned with the beauty of architecture. His eye is clearly drawn to the way that geometrical shapes can be applied to the real environment. He shows this by focusing his images on intersecting lines, details, shadows and compositions which showcase the interactions of shapes to the edges of the frame. This technique has an alienating effect - the structures are taken out of their usual context. This isolation not only elevates structures out of the mundane, but also allows Kerr to give us a different perspective on his chosen landscape, the Arizona desert.
As shown, all of his images are purposefully devoid of human presence. This gives a kind of lonely beauty to the images, relieving us momentarily of the stressful, busy cityscape we may be used to seeing. This use of space is personal to Kerr, who is naturally inclined towards solitude, and offers us a minute of calm. |
The series that we are mainly looking at is titled 'Ambiguity'. In these works, Kerr's education in graphic design and his influence from the minimalist movement can be seen in the almost featureless exteriors. His use of long exposure techniques helped him to piece together these images which seem to showcase line and form rather than face value. By presenting these structures in an opposite manner to the representational, the images become Karr's 'designs'.
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Venot has also stated that he is more inclined towards abstract photography than architectural. For him, architectural photography is too technical and working within the abstract field has freed his creativity. This can be seen in his choice of subjects - buildings, or more specifically, forms - triangular shapes, flat surfaces or angles. This characterises his photographic style, which is reduced in some way, flat and graphic. He says that is takes time and experience to train your eye in this way.
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Matthieu Venot is a French photographer who studied sound engineering and turned to photography at the age of 35. After living in Paris, Venot decided to return to Brest, Brittany - his home town. Through photographing the town from his perspective, he hoped to re-discover and better understand the place where he was born. He does this by, in his own words, treating his photos like paintings. He decides on a frame and puts those aspects that catch his eye into it.
Furthermore, Venot wishes to transmit a sense of his own optimistic vision of reality. He does this by waiting for a certain time (around midday) to take his photos. This allows him to use the optimum lighting - creating these sun-drenched images of his home town through a rose-tinted lens. Additionally, his photography studio is the outdoors, with his backdrop as the pristine blue sky. This relates to Venot's preoccupation with colour palette as the plain blue brings out often pastel colours in Venot's landscape. This passes on a positive feeling to the viewer, reflecting Venot's intentions to transfer his enjoyment of the photographic process onto the viewer. |
One of these is Thomas Demand, a German photographer who combines the art of photography with the process of sculpture. His work reminded me of this idea of abstract reduction - except that his process is opposite to mine. Demand recreates sculptures of whole rooms and set-ups, inspired by found images, then photographs them. In this way, he often lessens the detailing of things - for example, bottles found in a supermarket have completely blank labels. So while I am taking an originally detailed image and simplifying it, Demand is creating the simplified object or landscape itself, then photographing it, meaning the resulting work is triply removed from the original.
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Demand often takes inspiration from widely-circulated images, either in popular media like the news, or historical documents. This allows him to explore the impact that images can have on the population's memory. Once he is finished with his models, he destroys them, meaning they are purely contained to the images which he takes of them. The resulting images are strangely simultaneously meticulously realistic as well as unsettlingly artificial, relating to his belief that photography is a 'constructed reality'.
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We can see abstraction in all of Leiter's works over the years. Within his street photography, his use of obstructions, blurred movements and half-concealed details add a feeling of the unknown to this famed city. Looking at his iconic colour photography, we see his distinct dreamy style. The influences of abstract expressionism manifest themselves in his use of shallow depths of field and a vibrant palette to demonstrate his love of painting.
Finally, Leiter managed to build up a bank of informal portraits, not just of people, but also of a place. He creates his own almost sedated landscape. He does this by paying attention to the weather - both the drowsy afternoon sun and the falling snow blanket his photos in a sense of the fairy-tale. He also does this by focusing on the typography of the everyday as well as on lighting - neon signs and twilight hues romanticise this disconnected urban environment, finding intimacy and humanity in the cold concrete. |
Throughout the 1940s and1960s, Leiter created images that displayed a previously unseen tendency for abstraction and compositional maturity. Inspired by French painters, who also all happened to be photographers, Leiter painted big abstract colour works, however his paintings are not what he is known for. It was only in 2006 that he became known as a fine art photographer rather than a commercial one.
In Leiter's works, we can see the impressionism of Edgar Degas who used creative brushwork to bring abstraction to real subjects. Degas' continual study of the female form in his obsession with representing ballet dancers can be seen in Leiter's more grainy black and white photos of women that he knew personally. These photos are understated and intimate, reflecting the informal portraiture of Degas. The influence of photography on painters, such as using photos as reference material, can be seen in Bonnard's work, another of Leiter's influences. The use of the camera rather than the paint brush brings a sense of false intimacy between the viewer and the subject. These kinds of character studies catch people in revealing moments when they are not posing, giving us as viewers the impression that we are somehow there with them. This inspiration is prevelent in Leiter's documentations of street life in New York. These black and white images bring out a film noir version of the city. However, they also have an unmistakable human and hopeful element to them. Leiter focuses on lone figures in the snow, or the rain, often with umbrellas. His subjects are still for just a moment within the busy chaos of the city, for example pausing at a traffic light or day-dreaming. |
Graffiti can be great art, however for Stephen, 'the etched, scrawled and scratched graffiti into the plexiglass windows of the bus stop feels like a violation. Like a poke in the eye, or deteriorating vision through age or disease.' Despite his dismissive attitude, Calcutt manages to reveal some element of artistic beauty or intrigue in his photographs through his use of abstraction. He leaves the people, those meant to be the main focus of a portrait, as de-focused impressions, preferring instead to bring sharpness and definition to the scratches left behind on bus shelter windows, which he frequented in Birmingham. This gives an almost painterly affect - the photos at first glance could be collages or abstract paintings.
Despite this, Calcutt also shows us the gritty side to the etchings. What should be clear and a vessel for seeing clearly (glass), its nature and function has been 'ruined' by the obtrusion of the scratches. This is a deeper study into expressions of rebellion, frustration, hate or even declarations of love, these human emotions which people felt must be expressed. The intense energy of these defacements is heightened by the seemingly mundane scenes of people living their everyday routines behind or beyond the glass. This reflects Calcutt's interest in the way we function in public spaces. Our impatience and our innate urge to destruct is exposed plainly. Furthermore, the blurred landscapes that he creates evoke a dream-like state. This can be seen through the use of an imposed vivid colour palette and the use of the graffiti to blur or sometimes completely erase whole sections of visual information within the scene, leaving us unsure. This ties into Calcutt's ability to create a sense of detachment from people and the environment - not only the physical glass but also the very inscrutable nature of Calcutt's images act as barriers between us and the world, or our perception of the world, which is in itself distorted and de-beautified by the frustrated etchings that people leave behind. |
Jack Davison is a self-taught photographer from Essex who worked as a labourer for six months to fund his first project '26 States'. Davison stated that the task of photographing 26 states of America (which he calls a place that has been 'photographed to death') was a difficult one - to capture the personality and essences of each state. However, his unique portraits of all kinds of different people (homeless old men, marginalised youths, skaters) build up a kind of catalogue of his own dreamland version of America. The portraits here are brooding and intimate with a distinct colour palate or deep tar black contrasting to snowy whites. Davison believes that 'photography should be a conversation'. In order to take his portraits, he always has a human conversation with his subject first. Not only does this make them more comfortable, it is way of 'paying back' the subjects for the service they have offered in being memorialised in a still image.
This use of light and shadow is characteristic of Davison's photography more widely, as well as his tendency to lean towards the abstract and the surreal. He uses reflections and long exposures to support his compelling abstract compositions, for example, an eye and a mouth floating disconnectedly from plumes of smoke, reflecting the influence of his favourite Surrealist artist Dali as well as his love of fantastical books during his childhood. More recently, he photographs for magazines, adding his personal touch to what could be seen as a stale industry. |
Gasper Gasparian was a photographer who began his career in 1940 and ended it with having had a vital role in establishing Brazilian photography as an autonomous art form. He began with documentary photography, but began shooting landscapes and still life with a studied style which showcased the physical form of his compositions. Through this, he began the work of approximating photography to art with the help of other photographers such as Thomas Farkas and Geraldo de Barros.
His work is surprisingly appealing to our modern eyes due to his increasingly abstract focus on geometric shapes and aesthetic lines. He uses both strong shadows and tangible objects to create harsh angles within his photographs of Brazilian cities. His still-life work is more subtle and contemplative in its use of a more varied tonal palette. These works are also vital in showcasing Gasparian's wish to subvert the conventions of visual art. He chooses objects to photograph which are classic examples of those in painted still-life, and then manipulates our perception of these through various techniques. One of these is his use of patterned or fractured glass, which distort his subjects, acting as a kind of 'filter' over the lens which anticipated our use of photographic filters today. He also created his own subjects to photograph, mingling the process of sculpture with photography. These mangled metal rods which he bends to create geometric shapes and lines add a further element of abstraction as it is not clear what they are on first glance. His set-up also includes backgrounds - often overlapping shapes or solid blocks of black and white - which intrudes upon those subjects which are meant to be worthy of being photographed in their own right and adds to the overall confusion of the resulting cropped image. |
One of the aspects of Hepher's paintings that jump out at first is his interspersion of graffiti in his realistic paintings of buildings. Visually, they add elements of abstractions to the paintings as the graffiti style contrasts so starkly with the smooth structures. The words and symbols bleed into the buildings, interrupting and defacing their ordered geometry. The graffiti, for Hepher, is also a way of representing the human presence within the building without painting the inhabitants themselves. He calls the graffiti 'the marks they left behind'. His defacement of his own creations reflects the unexpected social changes of the buildings themselves and the inability of their architects to foresee what their structures will actually look like post-human presence. Another such defacement can be seen in his larger faces plastered onto buildings, as seen in the two images above. Hepher was inspired by the growth in advertising, for example, large billboards on buses. He began to incorporate large-format photographic imagery in response to this change. Finally, Hepher has said that he sometimes finds real joy and humour in graffiti around him, preferring to showcase the 'celebratory side' of graffiti as opposed to its 'bad name'.
Hepher's choice of building is also interesting. For him, they are representations of modernism more generally as these expansive modern social housing estates were built in the 1960s and 70s. He wanted to paint something everyone could relate to, rather than famous architectural structures, to emphasise the grandeur and impressiveness of his chosen buildings in their own right. His focus on their immense scale in reflected in the physical scale of his paintings which often spill across multiple panels, and his appreciation for them can be shown in his meticulous attention to detail, dedicating sometimes a whole year to one painting. |
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Kenwood House is a stately home in Hampstead, London, probably first built in the early 17th century. It was transformed into a neo-classical villa later on for the first Earl of Mansfield. It now holds a collection of Old Master and British paintings, including the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer.
I thought it would be interesting to overlay expressions of current life (street art, scraps of paper - all things the people of today have left behind) onto this concrete remainder of a feudalistic and conservative past. In this way, I could represent two different sides to the city of London. |
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