For this task I looked at GIFs and Video art. I took photographs that i used to produce a Gif In Photoshop. GIFS work well with the theme as they are repeated in a continuous loop.
A GIF Standing for ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ is an image that’s been encoded using the graphics interchange format where it has multiple frames encoded into a single image file and a web browser or other software will play those images back in animated sequence automatically
The definition of ‘typology’ is “a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences”. Essentially it is the study of types. The roots of Photographic Typologies is in August Sander’s 1929 portraits ‘Face of Our Time’ in which he documented German society between the two world wars. Sanders’ aim was to create a record of social types and classes as well as the relationships between them. Sanders was so successful in achieving this that the photographic plates were destroyed and his book was banned soon after the Nazis came into power. Typology can be used to create a visual analysis of objects and the larger environment by extracting visual elements and presenting them in a consistent series and so forcing the viewer to compare the subjects. The Becher’s and their style appeal to me because when exploring ‘variance and similarity’ I hope to create photographs that successfully show the differences and similarities in structures as the Bechers’ have done in a similar style whilst using the typology grids to emphasise the contrasts.
The term ‘Typology’ first came into use when used to describe the style of photography that Bernd and Hilla Becher were practicing. The Bechers documented dilapidated German industrial architecture in 1959 – they described the buildings which they photographed as “buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style”. Each photograph in their collection of work was taken from the same angle and the same distance from the subject with the aim to capture a record of the changing landscape as these dilapidated buildings began to disappear. The Bechers influenced generations of photographic typologists, such as Jeff Brouws and John Cyr.
Bernhard Becher (1931-2007) and Hilla Becher (1934-2015) were German conceptual artists and photographers who would work as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their topographic images of industrial buildings in Germany, as discussed earlier. The photographs were often organised into grids to show differences and similarities between the subjects photographed. They are the founders of the ‘Becher school’ or the ‘Dusseldorf School’. They have received multiple awards including the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award. The Bechers’ worked outside of Germany as well including photographs of buildings in Great Britain, France, Belgium and the United States in 1965.
Their work on typology began as they first collaborated on photographing the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959 – they were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed, which is evident in their work. After collecting thousands of pictures of individual structures they noticed that the different structures shared many qualities and were intrigued by the fact that so many industrial buildings were build with a focus on the design. The Bechers would work with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and would always use a straightforward point of view. They would only shoot on overcast days in order to avoid shadows as well as only in the early morning during spring and fall. A variety of subjects were photographed throughout their work including water towers, cooling towers, coal bunkers and gas tanks. Often the Bechers would exclude any details that would detract from the central theme. By photographing these structures the Bechers’ drew attention to the need of preservation of the buildings and some of them were designated as protected landmarks as a result of their work.
The Bechers decided to exibit their single-image gelatin silver prints grouped by subject, in a grid of six, nine, or fifteen and had come to the conclusion to present the images of structures with similar functions side by side to entice viewers to compare forms and designs based on the functions of the subjects.
The work of the Bechers were strongly influenced by the Weimar movement of New Objectivity in the 1920’s which was a movement in German art arising in the 1920’s as a reaction against expressionism. The term ‘New Objectivity’ came to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art involved in it. It was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world and ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazis. Some artists included in the movement in which the Bechers’ took inspiration are Karl Blossfeldt, August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzch.
In the Becher school they managed to influence a number of photographers including Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff; the work of their students also minimizes human presence and explore landscapes in a documentary style. Their school and work has had an impact on both Minimalism and Conceptualism art. Their legacy can be seen through the work of Lewis Baltz who takes a similar approach with a more modern twist to it. Their legacy can also be seen in the change in attitude to vernacular architecture – the Becher’s actively campaigned for protection of the structures that they photographed which led to the protection of industrial spaces.
In this photograph natural daylight will have been used to capture it. You can tell because of the soft tones and natural contrast within the photograph. A low ISO of 100-200 will have been used for this photograph as the Bechers’ would be trying to ensure that noise within the composition was kept to a minimum. A shutter speed of 1/60-1/150 will likely to have been used in this photograph – a shutter speed that is not too slow but not too fast to ensure that enough light could enter the camera lens from the overcast condition that the Bechers’ would shoot in. A deep depth of field has been used at the whole of the photograph is in focus. There is a warm colour cast to the photograph even though the photograph is in black and white – the warm colour cast reflects the comfort of the countryside in which the structures are based in.
There is no colour in the image as it is a black and white photograph. This shows that the viewer should be looking at the details of the subject instead of colours. There is a wide tonal range, ranging from the contrasting shadows of the structure to the over-exposed background. There is clear texture in the structures which makes the photograph more realistic to the viewer and gives it a slight 3D effect. There is pattern and repetition in the beams of the structures which makes the photograph more aesthetically pleasing for the viewer. The structures are placed in the centre of the photograph rather than using the rule of thirds as this photograph is part of a documentative-style approach in which the intentions were to show the form of the structures rather than to be aesthetically pleasing.
Bernd and Hilla Becher would document architectural structures all over Germany. They took photos of similar typologies and would make compositions of them all together. This is just one example of the work that they would do. They captured the pleasing aesthetics in the buildings deemed ugly and showed the country that there is more to it if they look closely. The Becher couple documented all sorts of structures and worked to open the countries eyes to what was right in front of them. They described the buildings which they photographed as “buildings where anonymity is accepted to be the style” and aimed to capture a record of the changing landscape as these dilapidated buildings began to disappear. The photograph is part of a collection of photographs intended to compare the structural qualities of different structures and would have been presented alongside another five or eight similar photographs of similar structures to allow the viewer to compare.
Typology (in urban planning and architecture) is the classification of usually physical characteristics commonly found in buildings and urban places, according to their association with different categories, such as intensity of development (from natural or rural to highly urban), degrees of formality.. Individual characteristics form patterns. Patterns relate elements hierarchically across physical scales (from small details to large systems). The definition of ‘typology’ is “a classification according to general type, especially in archaeology, psychology, or the social sciences”. Essentially it is the study of types.
Bernhard 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. 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.
Meeting as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1957, Bernd and Hilla Becher first collaborated on photographing and documenting the disappearing German industrial architecture in 1959. They were fascinated by the similar shapes in which certain buildings were designed and noticed many industrial buildigns shared many distinctive formal qualities.
Together, the Bechers went out with a large 8 x 10-inch view camera and photographed these buildings from a number of different angles, but always with a straightforward point of view. They shot only on overcast days to avoid shadows, and early in the morning during the seasons of spring and fall. Objects included water towers, cooling towers, coal bunkers, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, warehouses and much more. Their work also highlighted the need for preservation of these buildings. The end result of their work presented us with groups of photos in a grid of six, nine, or fifteen that highlighted the similarity between industrial structures. It is a very interesting concept to look at for the viewer which engages them to compare the forms and designs of the buildings.
I first wanted to explore the idea of repetition by creating a gif in Photoshop to generate ideas for my project. I chose the subject keys for my gif as everyone has them but with different variations in appearance i.e key shape, key chains. I thought by creating a gif showing different types of keys people have is a good way to represent the same object but in different variations.
To create the gif in Photoshop I chose >File>Load Files into a Stack> and chose all the images of the keys i had taken. I then selected all the layers and chose the speed i wanted the images to change.
Stands for “Graphics Interchange Format.” GIF is an image file format commonly used for images on the internet for sending images, especially moving images
I think that the limitations of creating is that you cannot see the movement in the image and only still objects if the timing of the images is slow, like the one I created above. Creating stop motion animations, if the timings were fast enough would create the appearance of movement which is something I could explore in my project. Another limitation when creating gifs is that it’s hard to create the same lighting in all the images which could make the gif look disorderly. I could also display gifs of different objects with more images than the one i may above to create more variation with a faster changes.
Andy Warhol has redeployed repetition as a device to alter our perception of a different type of society portrait – a portrait of celebrity. Warhol used an assembly line of silk-screened images of Marilyn Monroe as a metaphor for the loss of ‘self’ in the vicarious world of celebrity. Using silk-screening meant he could directly reproduce images already in the public eye, such as publicity shots or tabloid photographs. The technique also allowed him to easily produce multiple versions and variations of the prints.
He is known for his bright, colourful paintings and prints of subjects ranging from celebrities, to everyday products such as cans of soup. Marilyn Monroe 1962 is perhaps one of Warhol’s most iconic works. The work is made up of two canvases, each featuring 25 Marilyns printed in a grid pattern. The rows of repetitive heads suggest postage stamps, billboard posters or, perhaps more fittingly, film strips.
Warhol’s life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity. On the other hand, Warhol’s focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized.
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In 1980, Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto began working on an ongoing series of photographs of the sea and its horizon. From the English Channel to the Arctic Ocean, from the Norwegian Sea to the Black Sea, Tokyo-born artist has travelled the world to capture marine landscapes and create abstract canvas. Each black and white photograph is of the same size and cut directly through the center by the horizon line.
“Every time I see the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.” says Sugimoto who describes his vision of sky and water as a form of time travel.
Sugimoto refers to his signature photographic style as “time exposure” experiments – playing with shutter speeds other photographers could never master. His goal through these “experiments” is to capture time through his images – creating time capsules that will last for eternity. Eternity is a constant focus of Sugimoto, who also worked on series that dealt with the issues of life and death – intrigued by the transience of human life.
Sugimoto has said that he draws much of his inspiration from sculpture artist Marcel Duchamp – famous for his sculpture of a urinal in the 1950s. Duchamp’s art dealt heavily with the Dadist movement of art. Sugimoto’s works are a unique combination of the Dadist movement as well as the Surrealist movement.
William Christenberry was an American photographer and artist who was known for simple, richly coloured photographs of decaying buildings in Alabama’s rural Hale county. Christenberry was considered a pioneer of fine colour photography, and his work carries a strong sense of both place and the passage of time.
Christenberry showed Walker Evans some of his photographs, taken with a Brownie camera that Christenberry had been given when he was a child. He used the photographs at the time as guides for his paintings and sculptures, but Evans told him that the photographs were worthy of consideration as art.
Christenberry explores the effects of time on his boyhood home by choosing subjects such as buildings, signs, and found objects. Christenberry believes that all objects leave their individual mark on the landscape as time passes, even when the object is destroyed in reality.
The German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, who began working together in 1959 and married in 1961, are best known for their “typologies”—grids of black-and-white photographs of variant examples of a single type of industrial structure.
The seemingly objective and scientific character of their project was in part a polemical return to the ‘straight’ aesthetics and social themes of the 1920s and 1930s in response to the sentimental subjectivist photographic aesthetics that arose in the early post-war period.
They overlooked beauty and the relationship between form and function. 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.”
I think that Bernd and Hilla Becher’s work links to making gifs as they created series of images of the same objects in different areas. When making a gif I used different variation of the same obejct ‘keys’ aswell. Instead of displaying my work in a grid format though, i created a gif to only show image for a set amount of time.
To start experimenting with my images, I chose to crop out the mirror and replace it with a different image. To do this I used the magnetic lasso feature to crop out the shape of the mirror. I then moved this shape over to the image I wished to use instead. I changed the opacity so I could see both the space and new image, once I had the new image in the shape I wanted I moved it over to the original whole image. I then used shading tool to make the image look more like it was originally taken like that.
To experiment further, I used some filters on the mirror image to make it stand out more.
After conducting this photo shoot I could develop this idea further by looking at the work of Robert Smithson.
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 Pictures Generation, whose blend of Pop and Conceptual art was prominent in the 1980s.
“I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories.”
Stuart Pearson Wright
Wright plans a move away from portraiture, yet his projected subjects remain bound up with the enigma of his own identity and origins.
“People say I make my subjects look sad or old. I suppose I do instinctively either bring out of them, or project on to them, something rather melancholy.”
Wright explores identity of other people out of his own isolation. His obsession with portraiture formed out of never meeting his father, he was born as the result of artificial insemination.
Seydou Kaita
https://www.all-about-photo.com/photographers/photographer/125/seydou-keita
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/seydou-keita
‘Serving elite and middle-class patrons, his images often highlight the idealized or imagined socio-economic status of his sitters through the inclusion of props: cosmopolitan clothing and accessories, radios, telephones, bicycles, and sometimes his own car. To formalize the outdoor setting, Keïta regularly employed richly patterned backdrops that add movement and visual energy to his images and used a low vantage point and angular composition to highlight his clients’ confident facial expressions and relaxed postures. ‘
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-whiteread-rachel.htm
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/rachel-whiteread
‘One of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, Whiteread uses industrial materials such as plaster, concrete, resin, rubber and metal to cast everyday objects and architectural space. Her evocative sculptures range from the intimate to the monumental. ‘
(1884–1959) Portrait photographer from Arkansas in America, he captures harsh realism is rural parts of the country for 40 year. He lived a reclusive lifestyle only making human contact when taking hid photos. After leaving his family farm and changing his name to Disfarm as a form of rebellion he taught him self how to take and develop photos even building his own studio. He would charge 25-50 cent for a penny portrait which people from the community would buy as tokens to give to family and friends. He photographs, individuals sometimes groups generally with a natural expression not posing or overly smiling. The overall collection creates a sense of identity for the time, rural location and people who occupied it.
Being in jersey for a project which is very concentrated around natural beauty and finding a elements of visceral within the world is highly beneficial, however, I did belive it would too be interesting if I were to look more in depth at the word ‘opulence’ and what this demand to the people of jersey. In my previous posts I spoke much about ‘opulence’ being about what we consider to be wealth, the feeling or looking rich which brings us joy. And it is known jersey is one of, if not they biggest financial islands within the world, with billions invested into it, The very structure of jersey is the wealth which keeps everything turning, and because of this, I belive it would be beneficial to discuss if this wealth is peoples most important aspect to them, living in jersey. Although not everyone in jersey is wealthy, A large majority are, or a very few are incredibly rich with assists. Because of this the expenses of jersey is much more costly, but in tern, this is still a contributing factor as why jersey is such a pivotal essence of importance. However not only is his wealth within money a huge factor to jerseys success and why many people living here would view it as opulent, but also many belive jersey is and can be considered paradise, it is only an island 9-5 but it has many beaches vast and long, with beautiful bays, and award winning views. Its hospitality is enormous, and much of the reason jersey itself used to be considered an island wholey for tourism. However because this wealth of money is now the biggest factor of why I am to again these images I thought, it would be interesting to loOk at the issues of wealth from a mediated point of view, considering different philosophies and angles, in order for me to gain more knowledge as to why and how I could develop my work to see a new angle of jersey, that perhaps tells the truth even more so than my current shoots. Media: I believe throughout this project my knowledge on media could only but benefit my work as a whole. I belive if I were to expand my project more into fashion and fine art, possible focusing more on the beauty of people, I could once again add in the discussion of the male gaze and the female gaze. This also links into my project in the reflection of personal identity then to comes down to the relation for beauty, so using self portraits. I could use my perspective from being female in order to produce such a look which questions a gender perfomativity, and use elements such as the twin mechanises to form elements of schophilia, and create an elements that people might want to look at.
After going through the exam paper and gaining understanding of what variation and similarities can mean i have generated a few ideas i could pursue to show ‘variation and similarities’.
