Compare How Phillip Toledano’s  and Nancy Borowick’s photography represent the concept of loss?

How have concepts of family, separation and memory been explored in the photo books of Sarello, Casanova and Germain?

In what way is identity and autobiography expressed in the work of Chino Otsuka and Tom Hunter?

In what way does Carole Bénitah explore childhood memories through her work as a method of understanding identity?

How do Sam Harris and Richard Billingham, express the notion of family  and relationships in their work?

http://blowphoto.com/interview-birthe-piontek/

// was there ever a point where you thought, ‘i can’t share these pictures, they’re too personal’? // yes, i had to work on finding the right tone, like turning the volume up and down. in order to test this out, at certain moments i documented a lot of really powerful images, but it took me a while to figure out the right tone. there were some more visually explicit images of my fresh scars straight after surgery, at the time i was feeling a lot of anger and the tone was a lot louder. then later, i decided those pictures were for me and nobody else.

// what are you working on at the moment? // i have been working for a long time on a long-term project with my family in germany. they are all portraits revolving around the people and things i grew up with. over time it has become quite a substantial project dealing with, amongst other things, my mother’s dementia, and my parents are moving out of the family home and it’s all about the house and their things. this was originally about my need to capture a moment; when you live abroad and visit home you notice the changes more.

http://thehiddenphoto.pl/birthe-piontek/

Straight Photography Movement and Pictorial Photography Movement 

The Pictorial Movement 

Pictorialism, an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality, they  tried to make their they made images look similar to romanticism painted which tended to be very fantasy/ dream like. To create this effect pictorial photographers would often smear Vaseline around the lens of the camera to make the image distorted, the height of pictorialism was around the 1800s – 1910.

Characteristic of the Pictorialism 

• Pictures that look similar to paintings in  the same era
• Many images featuring the female body as the many subject matter
• The use of shadows and darkness to obscure some of the frame
• Out of focus images
• Blurry and fuzzy images

Pictorial Photographers 

Emerson’s Naturalistic Photography – In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) expounded his theory of Naturalistic Photography which the Pictorialist used to promote photography as an art rather than science. Their handcrafted prints were in visual opposition to the sharp b/w contrast of the commercial print

Examples of Pictorial photography 

Straight Photography 

Pure photography or straight photography is a photography movement which began in reaction to the Pictorial photography movement. Straight photography emphasizes and engages with the camera’s own technical capability to produce images sharp in focus and rich in detail. The term generally refers to photographs that are not manipulated, either in the taking of the image or by darkroom or digital processes, but sharply depict the scene or subject as the camera sees it. The movement began around the same time that pictoralism began to die out, so around 1910.

Straight Photographers 

Paul Strand – born 1890 New York City.The iconic photographer Strand redifined the medium through his portraits, city scenes, and abstract compositions that helped define modernist photography in the twentieth century.

Ansel Adams –  His signature style was characterized by a sharp, high-resolution focus and stark contrasts of light and shadow. Adams co-founded Group f/64, a collective of Western-American photographers.

László Moholy-Nagy. He was influential in promoting the Bauhaus’s multi- and mixed-media approaches to art, advocating for the integration of technological and industrial design elements.

Examples of straight Photography 

Modernism

'A general term used to encompass trends in photography from roughly 1910-1950 when photographers began to produce works with a sharp focus and an emphasis on formal qualities, exploiting, rather than obscuring, the camera as an essentially mechanical and technological tool.'

Modernism was generally based on idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.

Post-modernism

'Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism.'

The term was first used around 1970. As an art movement postmodernism to some extent defies definition – as there is no one postmodern style or theory on which it is hinged. It embraces many different approaches to art making, and may be said to begin with pop art in the 1960s and to embrace much of what followed including conceptual art, neo-expressionism, feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/modernism

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/postmodernism

After having researched the ‘Earth’ photography book published by  teNeues i came across the photographer Darren Almond – Page 94 of Earth book. His work instantly drew me in and i was inspired to look at his work in more detail and research information about the photographer. Immediately i was inspired to create a similar approach to photographing the environment when I saw his work.

Darren James Almond, born August 1971, is an English artist, based in London. Almond graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1993, with a BA (hons) degree in Fine Arts. He works in a variety of media including photography and film, which he uses to explore the effects of time on the individual. He uses sculpture, film and photography to produce work that harnesses the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, producing works which have universal as well as personal resonances. 

One of Almound’s projects that stood out in particular was his full moon project taken in Patagonia and Cape Verde. Almond shot by the light of a full moon. He stood attentively by his camera waiting for clouds to clear, then used long exposures of between 12 and 30 minutes. The results are both natural and unearthly, recognizable and oddly alien.

Quoted by Sean O’Hagan from The Gaurdian – “Volcanic rock emerges from a sea that looks like misty cloud seen from an aeroplane window. A river’s torrent is rendered smooth and sculptural, and the eucalyptus forest it runs through seems impressionistic and ghostly. Shadows lose their edges; they become soft and almost indistinct.” “With long exposures, you can never see what you are shooting,” Almond told me when I walked around the exhibition with him. “But you are giving the landscape longer to express itself.”

Image Analysis

This photograph appears to have been taken with only natural light of the moon as this photo comes from Almound’s ‘full moon’ photo book.  Typically, wide angle lenses are used to capture landscape photos, which is likely what would have been used to create this image. This image has a large tonal range, with the background and parts of rock formations very dark and sinister to the illuminated tranquil water. This image entails a large depth of field as the closest parts of the image are sharp and in focus as well as the furthest points such as the trees. A slow shutter speed would have been used to capture this image because we can see there is clear motion blur within the river. Thus helping to create a silky and smooth feel to the water.

There is a great use of leading lines within this photo as the river and trees/banks on either side of it, leads the viewers through the photo and almost takes them on a journey down the river. The composition of this photo is effective and uses the rule of thirds to its potential. The use of the rule of thirds can be seen through the river positioned on the left vertical line and the main focal points positioned on the cross over points. The  use of the rule of thirds is used because Almound is trying to show how beautiful the landscape is and by concentrating on visual and technical aspects of the actual photograph it influences the viewer that the thing being photographed is better than it actually is.

In ‘Fullmoon’, British artist Darren Almond catches landscapes around the globe, under the particular light of a full moon. With the shutter kept open for over a quarter of an hour, rivers, meadows and mountains are illuminated almost like daybreak, but the atmosphere is different: a mild glow emanates even from the shadows, star-lines cross the sky, and water blankets the earth like a misty froth. The enhanced moonlight fill the landscapes with a sense of the surreal or the sublime, and with haunting ideas of time, nature and beauty.

The conceptual idea behind this series of photographs and this one in particular is to leave you wondering what words like landscape and nature can possibly mean in a world where environmental change is so rapid that both are fast disappearing into myth and memory.

The aim of my personal investigation is to record a personal exploration into my family and origins within my family

The inspiration for my project and the sort of outcome I would like to achieve in my project comes from artists such as Birthe Piontek  and Donja Nasseri who are artists the explore similar topics such as family relationships and identity. In my project I would like to create images like the ones by Donja Nasseri where the finds interesting ways photograph objects or physical images that have a significant meaning, I intend to use those more abstract colorful images as a juxtaposition with some more poetic images with inspiration from artists such ad Birthe Piontek.