Theodore Brett Weston (December 16, 1911, Los Angeles – January 22, 1993, Hawaii) was an American photographer described as the “child genius of American photography.” Weston’s earliest images from the 1920s reflect his intuitive sophisticated sense of abstraction. He began photographing the dunes at Oceano, California, in the early 1930s which later eventually became his favorite location. Brett preferred the high gloss papers and ensuing sharp clarity of the gelatin silver photographic materials of the f64 Group rather than the platinum matte photographic papers common in the 1920s. Brett Weston was credited by photography historian Beaumont Newhall as the first photographer to make negative space the subject of a photograph.
“THE CAMERA FOR AN ARTIST IS JUST ANOTHER TOOL. IT IS NO MORE MECHANICAL THAN A VIOLIN IF YOU ANALYZE IT. BEYOND THE RUDIMENTS, IT IS UP TO THE ARTIST TO CREATE ART, NOT THE CAMERA.”
Throughout the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Brett Weston’s style changed sharply and was characterized by high contrast, abstract imagery. The subjects he chose were, for the most part, not unlike what interested him early in his career: plant leaves, knotted roots, and tangled kelp. He concentrated mostly on close-ups and abstracted details, but his prints reflected a preference for high contrast that reduced his subjects to pure form. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s Weston spent much of his time in Hawaii where he owned two homes. He would travel back and forth between them, shooting along the way: “l have found in this environment, everything I could want to interpret about the world photographically.” Brett Weston died in Kona, Hawaii, January 22, 1993. He was ranked one of the top ten photographers collected by American museums by the final decade of his life. His photographs are included in the collections of countless museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Photographic Arts.
a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences.
study or analysis using a classification according to a general type.
Bernhard “Bernd” Becher and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. For over 40 years, Bernd and Hilla Becher photographed the architecture of industrialisation: water towers, coal bunkers, blast furnaces, gas tanks and factories. They did so in an obsessively formalist way that defined a style, and made them one of the most dominant influences in contemporary European photography and art. Their work had a documentary style as their images were always taken in black and white, however, their photographs never included people. Both subjects addressed the effect of industry on economy and the environment. “I became aware that these buildings [blast furnaces] were a kind of nomadic architecture which had a comparatively short life—maybe 100 years, often less, then they disappear,” the artists said of their work. “It seemed important to keep them in some way and photography seemed the most appropriate way to do that.” They began collaborating together in 1959 after meeting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957. Bernd originally studied painting and then typography, whereas Hilla had trained as a commercial photographer. After two years collaborating together, they married. As the founders of what has come to be known as the ‘Becher school’ or the ‘Düsseldorf School’ they influenced generations of documentary photographers and artists and have been awarded the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award.
“WE DON’T AGREE WITH THE DEPICTION OF BUILDINGS IN THE ‘20S AND 1930S. THINGS WERE SEEN EITHER FROM ABOVE OR BELOW WHICH TENDED TO MONUMENTALIZE THE OBJECT. THIS WAS EXPLOITED IN TERMS OF A SOCIALISTIC VIEW—A FRESH VIEW OF THE WORLD, A NEW MAN, A NEW BEGINNING.” – Bernd Becher
Typology is the study of types, and a photographic typology in a set of images or related forms, shot in a consistent, repetitive way.
Bernd and Hilla Becher
The couple where conceptual artists and photographer who worked together. They were best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids.
Each series of images are capturing typologies, types of things. Each image is taken from the same perspective, angle and distance from the subject, this is an essential reason for why the series’ are so effective. All the images in each series have something in common which links them together, for example the images below the darkest part of the image is always in the middle of the building.
Mood-board of typologies created by Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their series of photographic images, (or typologies,) of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. They influenced many documentary photographers and artists.
Bernd Becher was born in Siegen. He studied painting in Germany from 1953-1956, then typography (the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed) from 1959-1961. Hilla Becher was born in Potsdam. After Hilla’s time studying photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1958-1961, she had completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in her place of birth. They both began working as freelance photographers (self-employed) for the Troost Advertising Agency in Düsseldorf, concentrating on product photography (advertising or commercial photography). The couple married in 1961. Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. The Ruhr Valley, (where Becher’s family had worked in the steel and mining industries,) was their main focus. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which the buildings were designed. After capturing thousands of pictures of individual structures, they noticed that the various large buildings, (of cooling towers, gas tanks and coal bunkers, for instance,) shared many distinctive formal qualities. In addition to this, they were intrigued by the fact that so many of these industrial buildings seemed to have been built with a great deal of attention towards its design. Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a straightforward “objective” point of view. They only did their shoots on overcast days, (to avoid shadows,) and early in the morning during spring and autumn. Objects included barns, water towers, coal tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coal bunkers, coke ovens, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, and warehouses.
This typology created by the Becher’s shows their objectives of conceptual art. They wanted to create a series of images where every object showed similar characteristics. These images were taken in Germany, as their images were based around the German industrial architectures. Each image is similar to the other, because of the repeated lines of wood that are used as part of each houses construction. This repetition effect is something that intrigues me towards these series of images. I like how each house has a triangular rooftop – the houses are a classic shape and although they seem like original shaped houses, they all have their own speciality that differentiates them from each other. For example, on the bottom row, second image from the right, this house appears to have 5 rectangular windows with a variance in how the panels for the window are displayed. The white panels all determine how many small squares there are inside of the window – some windows have 6 small squares, some only have 2 squares and 2 long rectangles. This same house has 1 door that has 2 slight windows either side of the door. This house is very different to the houses around it on the grid format, that the Becher’s used to create their typology. However, they all have similar shapes and objects that create the houses.
Winter Beacon, 1998 watercolour on paper David Prentice
These two artists, David Prentice, and Hiroshi Sugimoto have a clear connection that can be linked through their work by the abstract approach to the landscapes. There is also the absence of man-made structures this, therefore, gives their work a lack of identity without the context of where the landscape is.
However, there is a strong contrast between the two artists. Prentice paints in a wide range and variety of colour. These colours are bright and portray the landscape and exciting and inviting, whereas Sugimoto uses more greyscale tones in his photographs and instead of colour, his focus is on the lighting, texture, and technique in his images.
John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid-1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography.
“I guess a lot of it’s just lashing out, because I didn’t know how to be an artist, and all this time spent alone in the dark in these studios and importing my culture and constant questions. I’d say, ‘Well, why is this art? Why isn’t that art?'”
Baldessari first began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how these very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.A crucial development in Baldessari’s work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages. Text began to disappear from his work in the early 1970s, and since then he has generally relied on collage, but his work has continued to operate with the same understanding of the coded character of images. Typically, he collages together apparently unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result is to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages.On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1965, Baldessari was struck by the use of unpainted plaster to fill in missing shards of Greek vases. This prompted his interest in how images are effected by having portions removed or blotted out, and he has continued to explore this ever since. Often, the result of his alterations to photographs is to render them generic, suggesting to us that rather than capturing a special moment, or unusual event, photographs often communicate very standardized messages.
David Prentice was an English artist and former art teacher. He was born 1936 in Solihull and he was educated at Moseley Road Secondaey School of Art, Birmingham between 1949 and 1952, and Birmingham School of Art between 1952 and 1957. He died in 2014. In 1964 he was one of the four founding members of Birmingham Ikon Gallery.
His work features in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicargo, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and the musuem of Modern Art in New York City.
Winter Beacon, 1998 watercolour on paper
Above Llanberis Lake, Watercolour
The image of David Prentice “Above Llanberis Lake” uses a variety of blue and green shades. His work shows strong tone to create the shape of the lake and the valley that surrounds the area, this is supported by his use of shadows and light in his work. His uses the valley to tunnel the viewer’s eye to the horizon of the painting, this is where the main change in colour (from green to the blue, foreground to background) and the change in lighting is the strongest and most noticeable. The viewer’s eye is most drawn towards where the light emerges from the clouds as this is the lightest area of the painting which is followed through the sun rays.
John Baldessari is renowned as a leading Californian Conceptual artist. Painting was important to his early work: when he emerged, in the early 1960s, he was working in a gestural style. But by the end of the decade he had begun to introduce text and pre-existing images, often doing so to create riddles that highlighted some of the unspoken assumptions of contemporary painting – as he once said, “I think when I’m doing art, I’m questioning how to do it.” And in the 1970s he abandoned painting altogether and made in a diverse range of media, though his interests generally centered on the photographic image. Conceptual art has shaped his interest in exploring how photographic images communicate, yet his work has little of the austerity usually associated with that style; instead he works with light humor, and with materials and motifs that also reflect the influence of Pop Art. Baldessari has also been a famously influential teacher. His ideas, and his relaxed and innovative approach to teaching, have made an important impact on many, most notably the so-called Picture Generations, whose blend of Pop and Conceptual art was prominent in the 1980s.
Baldessari first began to move away from gestural painting when he started to work with materials from billboard posters. It prompted him to analyze how these very popular, public means of communication functioned, and it could be argued that his work ever since has done the same. He invariably works with pre-existing images, often arranging them in such a way as to suggest a narrative, yet the various means he employs to distort them – from cropping the images, to collaging them with unrelated images, to blocking out faces and objects with colored dots – all force us to ask how and what the image is communicating.A crucial development in Baldessari’s work was the introduction of text to his paintings. It marked, for him, the realization that images and texts behave in similar ways – both using codes to convey their messages. Text began to disappear from his work in the early 1970s, and since then he has generally relied on collage, but his work has continued to operate with the same understanding of the coded character of images.
Typically, he collages together apparently unrelated categories of image or motif, yet the result is to force us to recognize that those images often communicate similar messages.On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1965, Baldessari was struck by the use of unpainted plaster to fill in missing shards of Greek vases. This prompted his interest in how images are effected by having portions removed or blotted out, and he has continued to explore this ever since. Often, the result of his alterations to photographs is to render them generic, suggesting to us that rather than capturing a special moment, or unusual event, photographs often communicate very standardized messages. Here are some examples of his works:
After looking over some of his work I decided to create a response to the project he worked on called Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line. This project attracted me because of how bizarre and unique it was, using the formation of randomized ball positions in the air to create ‘art’. I then proceeded to make a response to this by throwing various balls in the air and attempting to capture them mid-flight, using only the backdrop as the main form of contrast in the photo. I would also experiment with shutter speed where I would try to capture other moving subjects, here were my results:
Once I had completed this task I decided to pick out the three images that I thought best reflected what I wanted to experiment with, here were the results:
I really liked the idea of capturing a subject mid movement as it allowed for a new stance of photography I had not previously explored. In future shoots I could look at things like birds mid-flight or people and shadows, this would open up opportunities for further abstraction of the environment photographed as by incorporating moving things it could bring the image into life.
