The surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.
The natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity.
After reviewing the title I started to come up with some initial ideas that I could incorporate into my exam. I began by noting down the first things that came to my mind when thinking about the title.
Isolating something man made in nature / visa versa – it could be interesting to look at the way we can change the atmosphere of an environment by placing a foreign object in it (e.g. a shopping cart in a forest)
Personal environments – it would be intriguing to create a project based on looking at my own or other people’s personal environments (where they feel safe / where they spend a lot of their time / where they perform their favourite hobbies ect).
Manipulating images of environments to totally change how we perceive them – editing and manipulating images to change the general atmosphere of an environment could be interesting (e.g taking a picture of a playground, putting it in monochrome, blurring it to give a ghostly feel to the photo).
Photography style ideas:
Using photography as a medium – some photographers these days now use photography in a sculptural sense (making installations with printed photographs).
Documentary photography – allows to give a truthful, honest image on an environment.
Abstract – that way we photograph something can completely change to atmosphere generally linked to a certain environment (focusing on a very small area of an environment to produce a creative representation of it).
Some photographers I could look at, relating to my initial ideas –Idris Khan, Stephanie Jung, Brno Del Zou.
Steven Hirsch is a brilliant photographer and teacher that was born and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Now based in New York’s East Village, his photographs have been seen in many major news publications such as ‘The New York Times’, ‘The Huffington Post’ and ‘Time’. Apart from this, he has also been awarded two of the ‘New York Foundation for the Arts’ grants and his work has been widely exhibited and collected by many prestigious museums. Hirsch’s photography has covered a diverse subject matter, including his project ‘Courthouse Confessions’, a visual chronicling of the defendants who passed through the Manhattan Criminal Court Building. Yet despite all of his achievements the reason I have chosen him to be my first inspiration for my project is because of one of his more controversial collections names ‘Gowanus’.
“Gowanus: Off The Water’s Surface” is a series of photographs portraying the horribly polluted waters in the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, New York. The toxic liquid that fills the Gowanus Canal today is not commonly referred to as alluring, celestial, beautiful. Yet through Hirsch’s eye’s, we see sludge, chemicals, and waste products become vibrant and moving images of colour. When Hirsch began shooting for this project in 2014, he took photographs in the Spring. “Because of the time of year, there was a runoff,” he says. “There was a lot of surface pollution because of that, which made it very interesting”. These depictions reveal a deep rich world of abstract shapes and explosive colour, the photographs are painterly in style, with Impressionistic hints of hue and texture. Within the pollution, surreal worlds are depicted and visions of figures, faces and bodies, and natural forms like waterfalls, landscapes, glaciers, or galaxies arise. These images were first featured in 2010 on ABC News online and more recently in The New York Times and the Daily Mail, despite being met with bitter controversy. I think this series makes an amazing start to my ‘environment’ project because they show a very abstracted and beautiful version of the truth. These images will be admired whether the viewer cares about the canals pollution levels or not. I love the way he has taken something so horrible and turned it into something beautiful, thus subtly informing the public of their society’s environmental problems. Below I have chosen five pieces from this series and evaluated each one.
– beautiful abstract photographs of polluted water by Steven Hirsch. – ‘Gowanus’ 2014.The first photographs that caught my eye from this series are the two abstract ‘painting like’ pieces above. The photograph on the left shows a dark and beautiful mixture of blue canal water, black shadows, multicoloured oil and gold reflections. This piece is entitled ‘Epiales’, which in Greek mythology is the name of the spirit and personification of nightmares. Because of this mythical context, we can assume it is more about the colours, shapes and beautiful symbolism; then the recording societies effect on the canal. However, I believe that because of the nature of this represented character being the ‘personification of nightmares’, this image takes on a much deeper meaning. Human culture naturally and ‘accidentally’ creates these beautifully sickening masterpieces on the water’s surface, so traumatic to the environment it can be compared with nightmares. The photograph on the right comes at this theme from a different viewpoint. Entitled ‘Chloris’, the goddess of flowers, it seems as if it would have a much happier theme. This, however, is not possible with the vibrant, unnatural and toxic colours swirling together mimicking and possibly one day replacing the natural colours found in beautiful untouched flowers.These next two astral looking images really express the representation of this project well for me. On the left is a piece entitled ‘Phorcys’, in greek mythology, meaning the ancient sea-god of the hidden dangers. Although this piece looks like a galaxy to me, with its bright colours and deep black background, the title has completely changed its context. Now knowing that this image relates to the dangers of the sea it is a clear representation of constant man-made disasters, like oil spills, that pollute our oceans. I love the beauty he has captured of the oil shimmering on the water’s surface and the ripples that really emphasises its dark and daunting meaning. The next photograph on the left is a bit more straight-forward as it is indeed meant to appear as a constellation of stars. The title of this image, ‘Pleiades’, is named after the seven mountain-nymph sisters who were banished to live amongst the stars. In astronomy ‘Pleiades’ is an open star cluster dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. This astral depiction of all of these dead inhabitable stars (showed with canal pollution) for me, represents the bigger picture of the universe and our underappreciation of Earth as a source of life.
* Specified Task – Key Image Evaluation: Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting the water’s surface lined with reflective oil that is distorted by ripples. I love the perspective the ripples give water and the composition of the many recurring rings inside the frame. Its populated location, current time period and abstract view can tell us a lot about the context and tone of this image. This piece is named after ‘Hephaestus’ the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, metals and fire. This is a very obvious connection between the metallic shine of the oil and the ‘Greek god of metal’. Because of the titles of each of these pieces being related to Greek mythology, we can assume there is a greater meaning behind the beauty of each image. However, since researching further into this series I have found that for Hirsch, it’s the composition that fascinates him. In an interview about his work, he explains that “a lot of people see an environmental disaster. I just want the pictures to look beautiful”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is up to the viewer, some may choose to see the tragedy and others simply the beauty. For me, I believe the meaning of this image is very strongly orientated towards this environmental issue. This oily subject matter and its array of man-made colours is directly linked to the pollution we face in current times paired with the result of sustaining populated cities. I believe that the recurring ringlets in this photograph can symbolise humanity’s devastating and repetitive actions against nature and the beautiful colours shows our distraction and ignorance towards the subject. Overall I love the abstract nature of this image as it contains lots of intense reflective light creating brilliantly contrasted tones. These shadows in the water create a great perspective for this photograph and give us a strong clue for understanding the subject matter. My favourite factor in this image is, of course, the brilliant and vibrant colours that flow from, and contrast,each other.
“My sky photographs in 1988 were a play on color field painting: Reinhardt, Rothko, et al. But my photos were not trying to emulate painting – they were exploring the nature of the (profound) differences between photography and painting”
Richard Misrach is an American Contemporary photographer and also one of my favourite photographers from the New Topography and social landscape movement. He is from California and he specialized in landscape photography where colour was often a prominent and relevant feature in his photography, he is also well known for his photography of the American West with his photography series ‘Desert Cantos’. In his early year before he gained a passion for photography, he studied psychology in the Los Angeles University in California where he studied Psychology and also pursued a degree in mathematics. He then went onto looking at homelessness in Los Angeles where he published ‘Telegraph 3 AM’ which were black and white photogrpahs. This was done to help raise awareness and improve the lives of the people who lived there, after this we went to southern California to take a very different approach, moving away from photographing people and focusing on the land around us.
People on Raft with Oil Derricks, Santa Barbara , 1984 Kodak, Donna, Debra, Jake, Oregon Coast, 1984 Oil Derricks, Santa Barbara, 1984 Battleground Point #41, 1999 Battleground Point #2, 1999 Pyramid Lake (Orange), 1997 Battleground Point #2, 1999
Don and Barbara, Salton Sea, 1985
Mono Lake #2, 1999 Don and Barbara, Salton Sea, 1985 Tourists, Utah, 1994 Aerial Target ( Road Blockade and Pyramids , 1989 San Gorgonio Pass, 1981 Cloud #005, 1987 Aerial Target (“Dart”), Wendover Air Base, Utah, 1990
“I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas. It engages people when they might otherwise look away”
Desert Cantos
This series of photographs were taken over a number of years and is an ongoing series of photographs which focus on the american deserts which started in 1979, four years after the New Topographic’s exhibition, which Richard Misrach wasn’t part of, although there are allot of similarities between the his work and the movement. The use of the word cantos comes from the word ‘canto’ which refers to a section of a long poem, which refers to ‘The Cantos’ which is an incomplete poem by Ezra Pound. This series was a big step from his earlier work, in both aesthetic style and the fast it was such an ambitious series. To me the series shows a certain softness but also sublimity from something desolate, I think the simplicity and the colour schemes such as the morning/evening sky and how it softens and creates an unsaturated appearance to the photographs reflects a deeper, abstract and more poetic meaning and concept in the same way that a poem would. It also shows a clear and obvious sense of how we live in such a desolate environment.
The conclusions offered are multi-faceted: human use and habitation of the desert have resulted in a great deal of destruction of a fragile environment, but at the same time the human intrusion seems small and ultimately of little consequence – Essay by Reyner Banham.
Border Cantos is a sub project to accompany his ongoing Desert Cantos series where he worked with composer Guillermo Galindo. This project focuses on the border between mexico and the United states which was started in 2004. It is also a statement on the environment and our effects on it such as with the use of transport and waste. I like how this project captures the variety of the American/Mexican border.
from Petrochemical America, photographs by Richard Misrach, Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff (Aperture 2012).
Petrochemical America
These photographs were taken as part of a commission in 1998 on wards to document the surroundings and the areas where people live around the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the area had become a heavily industrial area, where petrochemicals and factories were everywhere, this has lead to chemicals, waste and other toxins to ruin the wildlife and quality of the water. This series ties in very well with that of Ansel Adams in the way that it wants to evoke a sense of environmentalism and how we need to protect and be aware of nature but instead of focusing on the beauty of the untouched natural landscape, it looks at how we have changed and destroyed the land into something many would consider unsightly but instead appreciating the beauty and aesthetic qualities of the desolate and degraded landscape. Overall I find these photographs sort of ominous, they share the same softness of the Desert Cantos, but with a very different eerie tone and ambiance with grey, blue and green tones as well as the fact that they often feature gloomy and overcast skies, they are a clear example of how people go and leave an area, leaving marks and belongings behind, they show a clear sense of how unwanted the area is and how something that once carried potential can be ruined and then left.
“I’d never heard of this area, and when I finally saw the landscape, I was shocked. It was really extreme, the amount of industry along the river and the poor communities living there, I couldn’t believe it actually existed”
The two series both reflect the variety of changes we have created to our environment as well as the unique change and regrowth of the climate, this is seen to struggle and adapt to our effects. The changes of Border Cantos were often a lot more subtle compared to the decaying appearance of Cancer Alley for example the landscape of Border Cantos shows lush grass that grows around borders and clear skies whilst on the other hand the deteriorating and over littered land displayed in the Cancer alley series depicts decay and the lands inability to cope with mans careless disposal of waste.
Abandoned Trailer, Mississippi River, Near Dow Chemical Plant, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998, from Petrochemical America
I was really intrigued by the representation the destruction and deterioration of the natural land due to of waste in this photograph. The fogginess adds to the eeriness of the photograph. This is quite an uncomfortable photograph to view, the stillness of the water accompanied by the vast amounts of rubbish emphasize a sense of abandonment, even with the array of waste, there is still a sense of barrenness thru ought the photograph. The photograph depicts a sense of lifelessness from the effects of human consumption and the effects of how society carelessly uses the environment until it is no longer useful. I think this is one of his most jarring photographs which is a honest reflection of the effects of people on the environment.
Night Fishing, Near Bonnet Carré Spillway, Norco, Louisiana, 1998
In this photograph, we can see a fisherman fishing along a seemingly quiet lake in the foreground, onlooking a bustling and almost chaotic appearing industrial city, which the lights reflecting off of the still surface of the lake. I like the contrast of energy and colour on the different sides of the lake, one being calm, natural, uneven and dark in contrast to the bright and industrialized city view in the background. As in many of Misrach’s photographs, this photograph has a very simple colour scheme of light grey, pale pastel colours as well as dark greens and browns as well as a soft clear sky. The blurry boat and an interesting and abstract effect. Overall I think the message that Misrach wanted to illustrate was both political and social, the fact that the person is so small in comparison to that else is in the photograph such as the immense size of the boat and the city in the background as well as the vastness of the lake is an example of our insignificance but also our power and ability to create and change the landscape in such a compelling way.
Outdoor Dining, Bonneville Salt Flats – Utah, 1992
This photograph was taken on the salt flats in Utah, which is a vast flat area of salt which goes for miles and miles. Similar to the first I like the simple yet memorable colour scheme and the minimalist components, such as how the ground is so similar to the sky in colour and texture, which makes the photograph appear more abstract. As a while the photograph appears unusual and almost surreal, as if someone had photo shopped furniture from a restaurant into and already unusual landscape, the mountains also look very out of place, the perfect line and contrast between the salt lake and the mountain makes it appear as if the the mountain hovers over the horizon.
His work is a reflection of the Americans peoples relationship with the landscape. He has done this by focusing on land where there is a clear depiction of the effects of humans such as waste products, building materials, but instead of most environmental photographers who focus on the more political message, he emphasizes the beauty of these landscapes, his work reflects a very intriguing aesthetic with his use of colour and hues. This focus on beauty and aesthetics emphasizes the romantic element in his work. There is also something very poetic about his work, the photographs are never overly cluttered and leave focus on the colours and composition. Also the most astonding feature about his work is even though it is a focus on the effects of people, there are very rarely people present in his photogrpahs, refelcting a certain uncanniness in his work.
After a class discussion, which then lead to group work, various ideas about the concept of environment were noted down in the form of a mind map. Many ideas were developed and later fed back to the class to provoke some thoughts and initial ideas.
From the feedback I gathered, the one idea that provoked the most thought and inspiration was the idea of childhood and upbringing. This was largely due to the fact that envisioned a timeline of some sort, documenting the change in lifestyle that comes with growing up and the different perceptions we have of our environment as we age. With this idea in mind, I decided to create my own individual mind map to see how I could develop this new idea.
Ivan Troyanovsky is a bit of an unknown artist, however his photographs speak for themselves. He captures his friends and loved ones in exciting environments, capturing events and moments which happen in his life, usually embracing his natural surroundings.
I love this photograph because even though the sea is rough and the weather is bad, the image still maintains a sense of calmness. The photograph is minimalistic and this represents them being isolated, they are segregated from the worries and issues of daily life, hence generating a peaceful, calm aesthetic.
This photograph evokes a happy and carefree atmosphere, as generated by the bright visuals and humorous facial expression upon the face of the subject.
This photograph maintains a strong composition, and places vivid emphasis on the subject in the center. The man pictured in the middle, is obviously intended to be the focal point of this image as demonstrated by the way in which he is a lot more colorful than the remaining photograph. This is meant to represent the fun-spirited, youthful generation in juxtaposition with the industrial and corporate lifestyle which is represented by the monotone, suited figures surrounding him.
The first photographs that caught my eye from this series are the two abstract ‘painting like’ pieces above. The photograph on the left shows a dark and beautiful mixture of blue canal water, black shadows, multicoloured oil and gold reflections. This piece is entitled ‘Epiales’, which in Greek mythology is the name of the spirit and personification of nightmares. Because of this mythical context, we can assume it is more about the colours, shapes and beautiful symbolism; then the recording societies effect on the canal. However, I believe that because of the nature of this represented character being the ‘personification of nightmares’, this image takes on a much deeper meaning. Human culture naturally and ‘accidentally’ creates these beautifully sickening masterpieces on the water’s surface, so traumatic to the environment it can be compared with nightmares. The photograph on the right comes at this theme from a different viewpoint. Entitled ‘Chloris’, the goddess of flowers, it seems as if it would have a much happier theme. This, however, is not possible with the vibrant, unnatural and toxic colours swirling together mimicking and possibly one day replacing the natural colours found in beautiful untouched flowers.
These next two astral looking images really express the representation of this project well for me. On the left is a piece entitled ‘Phorcys’, in greek mythology, meaning the ancient sea-god of the hidden dangers. Although this piece looks like a galaxy to me, with its bright colours and deep black background, the title has completely changed its context. Now knowing that this image relates to the dangers of the sea it is a clear representation of constant man-made disasters, like oil spills, that pollute our oceans. I love the beauty he has captured of the oil shimmering on the water’s surface and the ripples that really emphasises its dark and daunting meaning. The next photograph on the left is a bit more straight-forward as it is indeed meant to appear as a constellation of stars. The title of this image, ‘Pleiades’, is named after the seven mountain-nymph sisters who were banished to live amongst the stars. In astronomy ‘Pleiades’ is an open star cluster dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. This astral depiction of all of these dead inhabitable stars (showed with canal pollution) for me, represents the bigger picture of the universe and our underappreciation of Earth as a source of life.
Lastly is my favourite image from this collection depicting the water’s surface lined with reflective oil that is distorted by ripples. I love the perspective the ripples give water and the composition of the many recurring rings inside the frame. Its populated location, current time period and abstract view can tell us a lot about the context and tone of this image. This piece is named after ‘Hephaestus’ the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, metals and fire. This is a very obvious connection between the metallic shine of the oil and the ‘Greek god of metal’. Because of the titles of each of these pieces being related to Greek mythology, we can assume there is a greater meaning behind the beauty of each image. However, since researching further into this series I have found that for Hirsch, it’s the composition that fascinates him. In an interview about his work, he explains that “a lot of people see an environmental disaster. I just want the pictures to look beautiful”. This quote tells us that the meaning of these images is up to the viewer, some may choose to see the tragedy and others simply the beauty. For me, I believe the meaning of this image is very strongly orientated towards this environmental issue. This oily subject matter and its array of man-made colours is directly linked to the pollution we face in current times paired with the result of sustaining populated cities. I believe that the recurring ringlets in this photograph can symbolise humanity’s devastating and repetitive actions against nature and the beautiful colours shows our distraction and ignorance towards the subject. Overall I love the abstract nature of this image as it contains lots of intense reflective light creating brilliantly contrasted tones. These shadows in the water create a great perspective for this photograph and give us a strong clue for understanding the subject matter. My favourite factor in this image is, of course, the brilliant and vibrant colours that flow from, and contrast,each other.
