Étienne-Jules Marey, born 5 March 1830, in Beaune, was a French scientist, physiologist and chronophotographer. His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography. He is widely considered to be a pioneer of photography and an influential pioneer of the history of cinema.
To study the flight of birds, he invented a camera in 1882 with magazine plates that recorded a series of photographs; the pictures could be combined to represent movements. In 1894 he adapted the motion-picture camera to the microscope. Marey’s chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, with all the frames recorded on the same picture. Using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey’s “animated zoo”. Marey also conducted the famous study about cats always landing on their feet. He conducted very similar studies with a chicken and a dog and found that they could do almost the same. Although Marey was a man of science, one cannot ignore his profound contribution to photography.
The 19th century was the golden age of landscape painting in Europe and America. Three aesthetic concepts established during the Romantic era divided the natural world into categories: the Pastoral, the Picturesque, and the Sublime. The first two represent Nature as a comforting source of physical and spiritual sustenance. The last, as articulated by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), refers to the thrill and danger of confronting untamed Nature and its overwhelming forces . This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists. Burke associates qualities of “balance,” “smoothness,”and “color” with the beautiful, while he speaks of the sublime in terms such as “vastness” and “terror”.
Beauty/ Pastoral
Beauty is a widely employed term, referring typically to aesthetic experiences that are pleasing, while to some extent transcending preferences and needs that are specific to an individual. That is, the experience of something beautiful will please a subject for reasons that reach beyond the subjective inclinations of the subject and that can be experienced also by many other subjects. The scenes are peaceful, often depicting ripe harvests, lovely gardens, manicured lawns with broad vistas, and fattened livestock. Man has developed and tamed the landscape – it yields the necessities we need to live, as well as beauty and safety.
Picturesque
Picturesque arose as a mediator between opposed ideals of beauty and the sublime, showing the possibilities that existed in between these two rationally idealised states, seen as being artistic but containing elements of wildness or irregularity. Derived from the Italian pittoresco, “from a picture,” the term picturesque de nes an object or view worthy of being included in a picture. It is an aesthetic category developed in the eighteenth-century to describe, in the words of artist and author William Gilpin (1724 – 1804) in his 1768 art treatise Essay on Print, ‘that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’. It was associated with fashionable landscape gardening, however its cultural significance extended far beyond this.
A picturesque view contains a variety of elements, curious details, and interesting textures, conveyed in a palette of dark to light that brings these details to life. In later publications Gilpin developed the concept more fully. The picturesque may be thought of as halfway between the beautiful, with its emphasis on smoothness, regularity, and order; and the sublime, which is all about vastness, magnitude, and intimations of power; the picturesque must combine aspects of both of those. A picturesque landscape would have characteristics of roughness (which includes textured or variegated surfaces) — indeed, Gilpin wrote that “roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful and picturesque”
By the last third of the 18th century, Enlightenment and rationalist ideas about aesthetics were being challenged by looking at the experiences of beauty and sublimity as being non-rational. Aesthetic experience was not just a rational decision – one did not look at a pleasing curved form and decide it was beautiful; rather it came naturally as a matter of basic human instinct.
“Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque—between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.”
—William Gilpin, ree Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 1794
Sublime
According to Burke, the Beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is that which has the power to compel and destroy us. The preference for the Sublime over the Beautiful was to mark the transition from the Neoclassical to the Romantic era. Burke connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.
Causation can be divided into formal, material, efficient and final causes. The formal cause of beauty is the passion of love; the material cause concerns aspects of certain objects such as smallness, smoothness, delicacy, etc.; the efficient cause is the calming of our nerves.
“What is most peculiar and original to Burke’s view of beauty is that it cannot be understood by the traditional bases of beauty: proportion, fitness, or perfection. The sublime also has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty. Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear. He believed that “terror is in all cases… the ruling principle of the sublime.”
In landscape the sublime is exemplified by J.M.W Turner’s sea storms and mountain scenes and in history painting by the violent dramas of Henry Fuseli. The notion that a legitimate function of art can be to produce upsetting or disturbing effects was an important element in Romantic art and remains fundamental to art today. Painters like Turner and Constable wanted to express the sublime in visual art. They were landscape painters and, although in different ways, they emphasized the strength of natural elements and studied the effects of different weather conditiond on the landscape. In 1814 the English landscape painter John Constable put this in his own words when he said the beauty of nature generates a train of associations that leads “to the contemplation of higher, spiritual values”(Anne Lyles, Sublime Nature: John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from theMeadows, Tate) and his idea is illustrated in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows 1831. Constable’s dark, passionate clouds, are in contrast to the sunlight of the foreground, where you see the church scene as gothic, and negative. These aspects of the painting widens towards sublimity: God, nature and man. Burke favoured this aesthetic idea over Beauty because, he said, ‘astonishment, obscurity and vastness cause a more powerful physical reaction in us than Beauty’s orderly calm’
Because the sublime is emotional, it is traditionally considered something one must experience alone. It’s no coincidence that Rousseau’s last work was titled Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Traditional Romantics associate the sublime directly with nature, and the artist, poet or simply the Romantic experiences the sublime directly witnessing the beauty of nature. But it’s important not to confuse or reduce the sublime with simple beauty, rather, Romantics are interested in natural experiences that utterly consume us, perhaps moving us to tears, and giving us a humbling sense of the wonder and majesty of the natural world.
Imogen Cunningham was an American photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes. Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects. Members of Group f/64 thought that “photography, as an art-form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself”. Dismissing Pictorialism, f/64 proposed that the appearance of the photograph was more important than the subject matter. Cunningham found influence in the groups’ philosophic interest in natural forms but sought her own style. Whilst many other members of the group were mainly concerned with form, Cunningham focused on texture and light. She published an article called Photography as a Profession for Women in which she encouraged women to develop their own style in photography.
With the help of her chemistry professor, Dr. Horace Byers, she began to study the chemistry behind photography; she subsidized her tuition by photographing plants for the botany department. After graduating in 1907 she went to work with Edward S. Curtis in his Seattle studio. This gave Cunningham the valuable opportunity to learn about the portrait business and the practical side of photography. In San Francisco, 1920, Cunningham refined her style, taking a greater interest in pattern and detail as seen in her works of bark textures, trees, and zebras. As the mother of three young children, she was mainly confined to photographing her children and the plants in her garden and sought to expose the visually profound in the mundane. She became particularly interested in photographing flowers and abstracting the shapes of the petals and leaves. Cunningham undertook an in-depth study of the magnolia flower between 1923 and 1925. The importance of natural form in Cunningham’s abstract images has led to them being compared to the undulating forms in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. Although the two artists worked at the same time, Cunningham claimed she was not aware of O’Keeffe’s work until years later.
“ANYBODY IS INFLUENCED BY WHERE AND HOW THEY LIVE.”
Georgia O’ Keeffe
Georgia Totto O’Keeffe was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O’Keeffe has been recognized as the “Mother of American modernism”. In 1905, O’Keeffe began her serious formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but she felt constrained by her lessons that focused on recreating or copying what was in nature. During the summers between 1912 and 1914, she studied the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way she felt about and approached art.
Analysis:
O’Keeffe’s dramatic use of colour palette, line and composition presents flowers in an alternative way. Her works range from abstract responses of nature, zoomed-in and almost unrecognizable, to detailed, life-like responses that emphasize the beauty of floral subjects as they come. From the curves of flower petals to the rich tones and shadows within the composition, O’Keefe looks at flowers very similar to which Cunningham photographs, furthermore responding in artistic medium. Her vibrant works with colors that glow with energy and vitality, explore the amazing and intense colours that the environment has provided in natural forms. O’Keeffe often pushes the boundaries of the art world, in some cases quite literally with lines and forms racing off the edge of the canvas, yet somehow she always manages to maintain a sense of stability and produce works that are visually engaging. Her use of a variety of media—pastel, charcoal, watercolor, and oil—combined with her sense for line, color, and composition produce deceptively simple works. Her confidence with using these elements makes her style of painting look effortless.
“I FOUND I COULD SAY THINGS WITH COLOR AND SHAPES THAT I COULDN’T SAY ANY OTHER WAY – THINGS I HAD NO WORDS FOR.”
“The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It holds 99.8 percent of the solar system’s mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth — about one million Earths could fit inside the sun.” It creates an extravagant heat onto the Earth, and some describe the sun as ‘beautiful’ due to its warming “sphere of hot plasma.” There is various research about the history of the Sun and scientific research that explains what the Sun is and how it works, as well as other interesting facts about the Sun within our solar system. However, there is other interpretations of what the Sun is looked at by others from different cultures. Mythological reasonings have previously been used; for example, such phrases like the “Sun God” and “Sun Chariot” are Greek perspectives of the Sun. “A solar deity (also sun god or sun goddess) is a sky deity who represents the Sun, or an aspect of it, usually by its perceived power and strength.” The Sun is sometimes referred to by its Latin name ‘Sol’ or Greek name ‘Helios’.
Within the world, different countries and continents are hotter than others, due to their position on the Earth. This is because, countries that are closer to the equator are hotter than countries that are further away from the equator (closer to the northern and southern hemisphere). The equator is an imaginary line that runs round the middle of the Earth. It is directly in between the north and south pole. It divides the globe into 2 different parts; the Northern hemisphere and Southern hemisphere. “The equator is warmer than the poles because the equator is significantly closer to the sun than are the poles (i.e. the equator “bulges out” toward the sun).“
I think that the Sun is an important factor in everyday life. Many people look up to the Sun to be happy; for example, some people are in a much more positive mood when the Sun is shining. I think that my idea of photographing light and shadows will mean my project will portray different moods, showing the variation and similarities within different weather types and different shades of light and darkness. Using the sun as one of the bases of my project will help create light within my photography.
English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection.Muybridge’s experiments in photographing motion began in 1872, when Leland Stanford hired him to prove that during a particular moment in a trotting horse’s gait, all four legs are off the ground simultaneously. His first efforts were unsuccessful because his cameras cameras shutter speed wasn’t quick enough. In 1877 he returned to California and resumed his experiments in motion photography, using a battery from 12 to 24 cameras and a special shutter he developed that gave an exposure of 2/1000 of a second. This arrangement gave satisfactory results and proved Stanford’s contention.
Muybridge’s most important photographic study of motion was during 1884 to 1887 under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. These consisted of photographs of various activities of human figures, clothed and naked, which were to form a visual collection of human movements for the use of artists and scientists. Many of these photographs were published in 1887 in the portfolio Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. Muybridge continued to publish his work until 1900, when he retired to his birthplace.
Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of horror to World war 1. Modernism also rejected the certainty of enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief. Photographers began to produce work with a sharp focus and an emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool. In this context, “modern” is not used in the sense of “contemporary”, but merely as a name for a specific period in history.
Postmodernism is the name given to the defining artistic movement of the second half of the 20th century. Modernism was characterised by a rejection of previous artistic trends, such as Romanticism and a tendency toward realism. Postmodernism is a large movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture and criticism and that marked a departure from modernism. The term has also more generally been applied to the historical era following modernity and the tendencies of this era.
Charles Jones (1866-1959) was a trained gardener who worked at several private estates between the years 1894 and 1910. He also photographed what he produced. He created a series of gelatin silver prints of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Unusually he photographed them in isolation against a neutral backdrop so that the images highlight the distinctive features of the subject matter. Born a year later than Blossfeldt, he worked in a similar way but with more of a focus on the horticultural detail rather than an abstract aesthetic. Jones remained completely unknown as a photographer in his lifetime. It seems that his interest was not shared with anyone outside his immediate family. He died a near recluse in Lincolnshire in 1959. Some 500 of his photographs were discovered by Sean Sexton, a collector, in Bermondsey Market in 1981 and their value recognised. He was only identified as the photographer when the photographs were displayed on the BBC and his granddaughter identified them – and promptly wrote to the producer. Sean Sexton created a monograph about the images in 1998 and Jones subsequently enjoyed wider attention as a photographer rather than a puzzle. Since then his work has been exhibited by the Howard Greenberg Gallery (10 November, 2006 – 6 January 2007)
Image analysis:
Jones’ photograph of two white roses signifies the beauty and delicacy of flowers and their natural, untouched sublime. His photographic exploration of botany and horticulture is simple; he photographs natural forms as they come against a neutral background, doing little to change their form or appearance. However, his photographs are powerful as they represent the intrinsic detail and variation within nature. This particular photograph emphasizes the tonal contrasts between the flowers and the background. The white flowers against the complimentary grey background really highlights the main subject and draws your eye to the shapes and patterns, curves and folds of the roses. His work is extremely similar to Karl Blossfeldt’s, so I aim to respond to both photographers in my second shoot based around flowers / leaves. I too will place the natural forms I find against a neutral background, along with editing my images into monochrome.
‘Investigation of Love’ is an exploration on the abstract notion of love, determining whether photographic evidence is enough to prove the presence of love. The project was inspired by an application for a Dutch residence permit. The couple were required to share photographs of the places they visited together and things they did; objects form a story within the relationship, items they gave each other, purchased, found, or stole together. An anonymous immigration officer assessed the evidence to determine whether Russian-born Lilia Luganskaia was allowed to stay in the Netherlands with her lover.
“We fell in love and lived happily ever after’ wasn’t a satisfying answer for the grave looking officers at the Immigration Department”, Luganskaia told GUP. “They said: if you love him, you better prove it”, she added.
The collection of 514 personal objects is handled as evidence and has been photographed in a clean, catalogued environment and is displayed in the same way as a family photo album . It includes a set of dessert forks purchased at the Texel island flea market, postcards, the furniture which the couple bought together, books which they recommended to each other, letters from friends and relatives and even a dog.
The project asks whether several pictures of a couple justify love? And if not, how many more images would it take to do so? Is it at all possible to depict an emotional bond with photography? What other objects can prove love as well as the book does?
Image Analysis
The style of the image is very minimalistic due to its use as evidence. It prefers to remain conceptual, suggesting the idea of love through symbolism. The dog is the focus of the image, being placed in the centre on a wooden podium to represent its importance in telling the narrative of the couple’s relationship.
The dog featured in the series could be seen as a symbol of loyalty, between the couple as well as towards the dog that they care for in a parental manner. It says so much about their relationship in that they have obviously been together a long time, long enough to adopt a pet together, however the name of the dog is not given showing that there is still some aspects of their relationship that would rather stay private as intimate connections to each other.
Seen in the image is a lot of the colour ‘White’, in the background and in the fur of the dog. White is often seen as a representation of innocence suggesting that the love they share is pure.
The environment in the image appears to be well lit suggesting that artificial lighting was used.
Abstract is a term often used in art to describe artworks that may appear to be without a recognisable subject. It can refer to artworks that use forms that have no source at all in external reality. Or to forms that are ‘abstracted’ from the real world – based on subject matter found in reality but reduced in shape, line and colour to their simplest forms. It uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.
As it does not try to represent the material world, abstract art has often been seen as carrying a moral dimension, embodying such virtues as order, purity, simplicity and spirituality. Pioneers of abstract painting in the early twentieth century include Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, while Naum Gabo was an early pioneer of abstract sculpture. Since then abstract art has been indistinguishable from what we now know as modern art.
Abstract Artists:
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky is one of the pioneers of abstract art. His practice spans through different abstract art techniques and styles that would later be used by generations of abstract painters. Kandinsky first began to use expressive color masses separating them from forms and lines. Soon after that, he started to merge geometry with abstraction, thus participating in creation of geometric abstract art. Although geometric forms were not something Kandinsky was particularly interested in, in his art we see the first encounters of geometry and abstraction. Finally, his work at the Bauhas cannot be ignored. Here, Kandinsky theoretically examined the use of colors, and under the influence of Gestalt psychology, he began to focus on straight lines, which led to the contrasting tones of curved and angled lines on final compositions.
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the “inner necessity” of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
Kazimir Malevich
Malevich is also one of the pioneers of abstract painting, but he was also the creator of one of the most radical abstract art movements ever – Suprematism, a term which expressed the notion that colour, line, and shape should reign supreme over subject matter or narrative in art. The main interest of Malevich (and his fellow Suprematist artists) was to search for the so-called zero degree of painting, the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art. As a consequence, they used extremely simple motifs, subjects and forms.
The whole composition is focused on basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines, and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colors. Because of his contacts in the West, Malevich was able to transmit his ideas about painting to his fellow artists in Europe and the United States, thus profoundly influencing the evolution of modern art.
More radical than the Cubists or Futurists, at the same time that his Suprematist compositions proclaimed that paintings were composed of flat, abstract areas of paint, they also served up powerful and multi-layered symbols and mystical feelings of time and space
Yves Klein
Yves Klein was the most influential, prominent, and controversial French artist to emerge in the 1950s. He is remembered above all for his use of a single color, the rich shade of ultramarine that he made his own: International Klein Blue. For many, Yves Klein has been associated with minimalism and performance art. However, his legacy within the realm of contemporary abstract art is indisputable. As Klein said himself: Blue…is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not. All colors arouse specific ideas, while blue suggests at most the sea and the sky; and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
“Never using the line, one has been able to create in painting a fourth, fifth, or whatever other dimension – only color can attempt to succeed in this exploit. The monochrome is the only physical way of painting – permitting us to attain the spiritual absolute.”
Excerpt from the film Yves Klein, La Révolution Bleue
The abstract painting that dominated French art in the 1950s was invariably premised on the notion that an artist could communicate with the viewer through the power of abstract form. But skeptics of modern, abstract art have always alleged that the viewers, like the faithful devotees of a false god, do more of the work than the artist, investing the forms with their own feelings rather than discovering the artist’s. Viewed in this light, Klein’s monochrome blue paintings might be read as a satire on abstract art, for not only do the pictures carry no motif, but Klein insisted there was nothing there at all, only “the void.”
“… I thus seek to individualize color, for I have reached the conclusion that each color expresses a living world and I express these worlds in my painting. My paintings affirm the idea of absolute unity in the context of perfect serenity, an abstract concept represented in an abstract manner (…).”
Abstract Photographers
Ola Kolehmainen
Ola Kolehmainen is a Finnish photographer whose exceptional work could easily fit into the abstract genre as we previously defined. He uses architecture as both a starting point and as his main source of inspiration. Instead of portraying architecture in a direct form, he reveals it as an examination of space, light and color, all of which reflect and question our typical, human way of looking at things.
It is intriguing to follow how Ola’s representation of buildings evolved from a direct approach into an artistic vision thanks to his closer examination of structures. Because of his unique perspective, Ola developed a more abstract and independent language that allowed him to distance himself from architecture as it is.
Recently Kolehmainen has shifted away from his traditional minimalism, and expanded into a complex approach dealing with space, light, and colour in his first exhibition centered around historical architecture. Kolehmainen photographed religious buildings in Istanbul for half a year. In addition to their historical dimension, the artist probes the buildings’ architectural volumes and light ratios: the buildings’ interiors and structural details reveal the changing light of days and seasons.
Andrew S. Gray
From intricate and nearly impossible points of view to elegant camera shakes, abstract can be done in a variety of ways from simple to complex, all of which produce elegant results. Inspired by the paintings of the old English masters of pictorialism, Andrew S. Gray creates beautiful abstract landscapes with a unique style using intentional camera movement as well as well-planned color palettes.
He personally prints his work, which speaks volumes about his workflow mastery. In fact, Gray is so generous that he even helps people around the globe with one-on-one sessions and video tutorials in addition to offering online help for anyone trying to create landscapes (or other imagery) with a similar style of abstraction.
” Inspired by the paintings of the old English masters with a mix of camera techniques and post processing I have developed these painterly impressionist images of both recognisable and abstract scenes into a style that goes beyond what many consider photography.
The looseness and ability to play without being tied by the light or weather affecting the scene you’d normally be shooting is the style’s appeal to me, also the chance of creating a scene that was not necessarily there. Using a tool of which its sole function is to capture exactly what is in front of it and then making it almost become a brush with which we “paint” is a joy. The results I have achieved since first experimenting with intentional camera movement (icm) have been more satisfying than any photograph I’ve made previously. “
Maija Savolainen
Paperworks
The artist, Maija Savolainen is a recognized photographer from the Helsinki School. For this specific topic, we will focus on her project called paperworks in which she created abstract and minimalist representations of landscapes using a colorful palette. Much like watching a pastel ode to Hiroshi Sugimoto, Savolainen demonstrates through her work that the simplest resources can lead to the most beautiful simplifications and abstractions.
The series, Paperworks is a study on the colors of sunlight and the photographic way of seeing. The images are made with a folded, white A4 sheet placed in direct sunlight at different times of the day and year. When looking at the picture at a distance, one might see a horizon line. When taking a closer look, it becomes clear that there is something strange about the view. The horizon appears to be a fold on a sheet of paper, the colors are reflections of sunlight on the white surface; a little bit of information makes the eye see something else than before.
In her series ‘Works on Light’ uses recurrent materials, paper, thread, sand and reflecting surfaces in her photographs to showcase the different properties of light and the illusory possibilities of photography. “They are the elements from which other things can be formed through a photographic gesture. When the light hits a round glass plate on my hand from a certain angle it might resemble the full moon in an astounding way.”
Works on Light Rail Baltica
“To illustrate this feature, the Helsinki-based photographer Maija Savolainen has created still-life imagery that responds, on an abstract level, to the themes raised by Rail Baltica and the Talsinki tunnel. The sets which are built from paper and yarn, evoke notions of social and economic networks, overlapping and incompatible structures, parallel and twinned cities, and liminality.” – Crystal Bennes
