MARKING CRITERIA
All posts by Jamie Cole
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Variation / Similarity : generating ideas
1. Define and interpret the words
- Variation
- Similarity
2. Look carefully at the inspiration points below …
August Sander – The Face of Our Time
One of the first photographic typological studies was by the German photographer August Sander, whose epic project ‘People of the 20th Century‘ (40,000 negatives were destroyed during WWII and in a fire) produced volume of portraits entitled ‘The Face of Our Time’ in 1929. Sander categorised his portraits according to their profession and social class.
Sander’s methodical, disciplined approach to photographing the world has had an enormous influence on later photographers linked to The Dusseldorf School, notably Bernd and Hilla Becher. This approach can also be seen in the work of their students Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff. Other photographers who have explored this idea include Stephen Shore, Gillian Wearing, Nicholas Nixon, Martina Mullaney and Ari Versluis.
Read this article about by Hans-Michael Koetzle about Sander’s epic project.
The Typologist – a Tumblr blog
Typologies Flickr Group
Typologies article
Steve Tyler’s series Typologies of Mass Consumption
A great blog post about Typologies
Typologies Flickr Group
Typologies article
Steve Tyler’s series Typologies of Mass Consumption
A great blog post about Typologies
Boris Mikhailov – German Portraits
Nearly a century after August Sander’s portraits of German society, the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov created a series of pictures of the amateur actors in a German theatre company in the town of Braunschweig. Shot in profile against a black background, the photographer makes reference not only to Sander’s typol0gical study but also to Theodor Piderit’s Principles of Mimic and Physiognomy, published in Braunschweig in 1858 and also to Hitler’s interest in eugenics; Hitler became a German citizen in Braunschweig in 1932. The profile portrait also encourages the viewer to make formal comparisons between the sitters. Mikhailov’s portraits and those of August Sander were exhibited together in 2012.
Michael Wolf – Paris Tree Shadows (and other urban phenomena)
Michael Wolf’s early career as a photo journalist is perhaps evident in his various studies of urban life. He documents repetitive features of the urban landscape, clearly influenced by the deadpan approach of the Dusseldorf School and the New Topographics photographers. However, Wolf’s approach appears more concerned with the symbolic role played by mundane items such as his ‘bastard chairs‘ which suggest the density of the urban environment of Hong Kong and the human ingenuity of its inhabitants. Wolf often uses a strict typological approach, as in his series ‘100 x 100‘, repeating the same vantage point. However, Wolf is always interested in the individuality of his human subjects and the tremendous visual variety of the interiors in which they live. He often displays his images in groups or in series to draw attention to repetitive phenomena. There is humour and poetry in these groupings. A good example of this is the beautiful and subtle “Paris Tree Shadows’ series.
Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and primarily of Hong Kong, where he has been living for more than 15 years.
His latest pictures have also been created in a big city: Tokyo. But this time Tokyo’s architecture is not the topic. Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression focuses on the craziness of Tokyo’s underground system. For his shots he has chosen a location which relentlessly provides his camera with new pictures minute by minute.
Every day thousands and thousands of people enter this subsurface hell for two or more hours, constrained between glass, steel and other people who roll to their place of work and back home beneath the city. In Michael Wolf’s pictures we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way.
Try photographing one or more of the following…
- markings and patterns, camouflage patterns, shells, butterflies, fish, trees, bark, dog
breeds, eggs, seeds, collections
• family resemblance, size, shape, skin colour, facial characteristics
• models, variants, cars, lorries, vans, planes, trains, supermarket products
• customs, conventions, foods, languages, writing, calligraphy, music, dance
• uniforms, workwear, overalls, hats, boots, badges, labels, packaging
• uniformity, conformity, standardisation, monotony, routine, supermarkets, car parks,
office buildings
• housing estates, blocks of flats, front gardens, windows, doors, lockers,
• attempts to achieve individuality, standing out from the crowd, black sheep, rebels
• market stalls, spice racks, car boot sales, fairs and fairgrounds, zoos, arboretums,
public gardens
• microscopic creatures, snowflakes, crystals
• symmetry, asymmetry, structural variation, flaws, faults, schisms
• colour, tone, texture, shape, scale
• seasons, climates, weather types
Other starting points :
Recording the small variations in a familiar or narrow subject matter can sometimes hint at a wider truth and carry universal meaning. Mike Disfarmer’s portraits of local families and friends in a small town in rural Arkansas have a quiet intensity and honest conviction
that are appreciated far beyond the original limit of his intended audience. Seydou Keïta in Senegal, Malick Sidibé in Mali and Hashem El Madani in Lebanon have also achieved a
wider appeal in their portraits.
In such an accessible medium as photography, the human body has often been portrayed in a highly predictable way. Finding a variation on this well-worn theme can be difficult. Thomas Florschuetz and John Coplans are exceptions to this and have presented the body in ways that attempt to establish a more original variant on the
theme. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes present a more minimalist approach transcending the conventional seaside image.
Many photographers, such as Lorna Simpson create subtle variations of a similar image to make their audience look more closely at the world. William Christenberry returns
to the same places to photograph familiar objects and buildings over time, creating a kind of typology that has links with the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. In his book where Children Sleep James Mollison records the sleeping conditions of different children
across the world. Ian Breakwell, Jem Southam, Georg Gerster, Antony Cairns and Olafur Elliasson have all explored variations and similarities around given themes.
The illusion of movement is created by running together sequences of single images, each being a slight variant on the previous one. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs from the 1880s are still used as a basis for studying motion by animators and filmmakers.
Gifs made of his photographic series have a quality that is somehow both humorous and compelling. Steven Pippin in Laundromat-Locomotion paid homage to Muybridge’s processes. Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographs have similar aims, with perhaps more
poetic qualities.
3. Answer these questions / prompts…
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Why do you think photographers feel compelled to classify things, or types of things?
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how closely is the act of actually taking photographs linked to the variation / similarity of specific things (people, objects, places)?
4. Plan and action a photoshoot that…
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shows your understanding of typologies
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obeys the conventions of The Dusseldorf School approach