Strongest images

Franco Fontana

• Franco Fontana is an Italian photographer born in Modena, on December, 9th, 1933. He is best known for his abstract colour landscapes. He is known as the inventor of the photographic line referred to as concept of line.
• Franco Fontana is interested in the interplay of colours and he had based his own vibrant and original language on that. He explored different subjects: urban landscape, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude.
• He worked with 35 mm cameras, mostly on location claiming that his studio was the world.
• He began working as an amateur photographer in 1961. His first personal exhibitions took place in 1963 in Vienna, in 1965 in Turin and in 1968 in Modena. Since then he has participated in more than 400 exhibitions – collective and personal – and his work is in approximately 60 museum collections all over the world.
• Fontana doesn’t restrict himself to just the image, he transforms it to something else, probably curious about other people’s life.

I liked Fontana’s use of vibrant colours on normal objects to emphasize their abstraction. The colours bring out the detail and textures in a subject.

Tamara Lorenz

• German artist Tamara Lorenz creates various constructions which she then photographs to exploit their abstract properties. The addition of strong planes of colour provide another source of contrast in addition to those of line, shape, tone and texture.
• Rather than photographs of things, each image seems to create its own reality. Consequently, the viewer is unable to recognise a conventional subject and is occupied with the business of looking.
• Perspective, distances and proportions and weight — the layouts  convey a merging of different layers with unclear allusions that is not verifiable in reality. The photograph generates its own media-based reality analogous to the paradox of objectivity.

Tamara’s use of simple objects to bring out dimensions based on perspective inspired me to consider  the same techniques when taking my photographs.

Image Analysis

Fontana uses natural lighting in this image to show off the vibrance of the warm colours in the walls and the cold colours in the sky.

Franco Fontana uses a hyperfocal distance which allows for everything to be in focus, this makes the buildings and the sky become part of the same layer so that everything feels 2D and flat. It allows for him to present the textures in the grey buildings and the rooftop in the bottom left corner.

The image does not fit into a rule of thirds which increases the feel of the images abstraction because the vibrant and colourful shapes are in random locations.

Fontana had long found as much inspiration in the city as in the countryside. He saw in our built worlds more than buildings, surfaces, objects and colors. Through his camera he captured the moments when shadow and light appeared as solid as stone.

My Work

When taking the portraits, I painted face in different warm and cold colours to emphasize the details and textures. I placed glass blocks and prisms in front of the lens to sometimes distort the image so that it became more abstract.

I placed the prism next to a light beam so that it would split into the different colours.

I took these photos from my phone of the outside of the school building. I liked the shapes and repetition of the different roofs. On the day, the sky was a yellow colour due to abnormal weather so I felt it would be perfect to take photos of and see what it looked like after editing.

For these final images, I simply took photographs of different coloured paper layered over one another for dimension.  I found a 3D metal shape next to it so I added this into the picture for abstraction.

My Edits

I adjusted the levels of dark to light in this image to show of the spectrum of vibrant colours in the middle. I also increased the contrast to emphasize this. When taking the image, I used a narrow depth of field to put the focus on the colour in the fore and midground so the image had dimension.

For the above images, I increased the saturation to make the paper’s colour more vibrant.

I used the quick selection tool to select the sky and I changed the hue colour to a light teal colour. I did the quick selection tool again to choose the building, this time making it a redish colour to stand out. I then increased the contrast of the whole image.

I wanted to see what the image would look like if I inverted the colours.

First I took one of my paper images and used it as an overlay for the sky in this image. I liked it as it added texture and tone. I quick selected the 3 different sections of this image ; the sky, building and the ground and made them each a different colour that stood out against one another.

I took this close-up image and cropped it so that the face was the main focus. The natural lighting on the right of the image gives the cling film wrap (that I put on the face) shine and texture. By having each section of the face a different colour, I feel it shows the abstraction that I wanted.

I used filters from ‘VSCO’ for these images to bring out the colours in the prisms and glass blocks. The brightly coloured faces stand out through the glass but with a subtle flare over them giving it its abstraction.

I took these two images and in one I applied a filter, the other I increased the saturation and highlights to make the colours pop out. This also makes smaller details like the blue eye colour more noticeable.

Frank Hallam Day

• Frank Hallam Day is a fine art photographer in Washington.  He has taught photography at the Smithsonian Institution in other local programs.
• His work is in numerous museum and private collections in the United States and abroad, including the State Museum of Berlin, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
• His artistic interests revolve around the themes of culture and history, and humanity’s footprint on the natural world.  Recent projects include the erasure of personal and cultural memory in East Berlin, and on the impact of globalization on African identity.
• He was a winner of the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Prize in 2012 and the Bader Prize in 2006, and was a finalist both for the Sondheim Prize in 2007, the Sony Prize in 2010, the Voies Off Prize at Arles in 2010, and has received several grants from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities.  He was Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park in 2007, and was U.S. Cultural Envoy to Ethiopia in 2008. He has juried and curated numerous photography shows and competitions in the Washington area.  He also writes on photography for Photo Review.

I was inspired by Frank’s use of vibrant colours on roughly textured backgrounds as it shows of the detail in their surface.

Aaron Siskind

• Aaron Siskind was an American photographer born December 4th, 1903
• He is considered to be a massive part of the abstract expressionist movement.
• He began his foray into photography when he received a camera for a wedding gift and began taking pictures on his honeymoon. He quickly realized the artistic potential this offered. He worked in both New York City and Chicago.
• Siskind’s work focuses on the details of nature and architecture. He presents them as flat surfaces to create a new image out of them, which, he claimed, stands independent of the original subject. His work has been described as crossing the line between photography and painting.
• He died on  February 8th, 1991.

I felt inspired by Aaron’s work to use dark contrasted colours over different textures to present the different tones in their surfaces.

Image Analysis

Frank Hallam Day uses a variety of natural textures such as the sea waves and the rust on an industrial ship. His image is composed into equal thirds with each section a different colour, allowing for the different textures to stand out from each other. Assuming he used a fast shutter speed, the sea waves provide a rich clarity in detail. The Ship Hulls series shows Frank’s interest in shipwrecks and travelling as he went across Lagos, Nigeria taking a photo everyday. Frank presents vibrant colours through this image, in reflections and the ship surface.

My Work

Edits

I edited the above images in black and white like Aaron Siskind’s work. I liked the balance of dark to light tones and felt it might be included in the Ansel Adams Zone System.

I liked the textures of the sand especially when it had been messed up by footprints or gravel. These images worked better in colour to show the different tones of the sand in comparison to other things such as the feet in one image or the gravel rocks in another.

I experimented with different filters on the ‘VSCO’ app to bring out different tones in the subjects of an image. For example, in the above image, I liked the mixture of dark browns and blacks to brighter oranges and greens.

I quick selected each part of this wall and changed the hue colours to contrasting warm and cool tones that made it similar to Frank Hallam Day’s work.

In this image, there is a subtle blur yet vibrant colours draw the viewers eyes in. The natural light from above as well as the darker shadows help give the moss more texture by adding shine. I took this photo as a close up which makes it feel like a mini jungle of moss.