Henri Cartier-Bresson 

• Henri Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22nd, 1908 and was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35 mm film.
• He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. His work has influenced many photographers.
• His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, so Henri got the financial support he needed in order to pursue his photography ambition.
• Henri was given his first camera by a man named Harry Crosby who convinced the commandment to release him into his custody from a House arrest for hunting without a licence. They both shared an interest for photography.
• He died on August 3rd, 2004

Image Analysis

Technical: The image uses natural daylight to give a balanced tonal range that may consider it to be apart of the Ansel Adams Zone System.

The image appears to have used a wide lens and angle to allow for the majority of the image to be in focus, where it has a slight blur in the background. This also gives the whole image a feeling of stillness.

I believe it would have been taken with a fast shutter speed to capture the business of the street.

Visual: The image is presented in a Black and white 2D appearance. It is arranged to feature the repetition of the cattle.

Contextual: Cartier-Bresson was driven by a sociological impulse to India to convey the post-colonial development. He went at a turning point in his career as he had a “curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.” The curiosity would drive a long career in photojournalism, for which his India trip was an apprenticeship.

My Images

Edits

I reduced the brightness to -40, and increased the contrast to 53.

For the above 2 images, I took inspiration from Bruce Gilden’s technique of street photography and took photos of my subject by their suprise.

With the coloured image, I only increased the contrast to 56 on Photoshop. However, for the black and white image, I reduced the saturation before increasing the contrast to 20 and also decreasing the brightness to -12.

For this Image, I looked at the colour schemes of Martin Parr’s work and decided to incorporate this in my edit. This filter on the ‘VSCO’ app gave a similar feel.

I also used the ‘VSCO’ app for the image below however this time I also reduced the exposure.

I liked the style of Henri Cartier-Bresson so decided to edit some of my images in black and white by reducing the saturation. I reduced the brightness and increased contrast to present different tonal ranges.

This is one of my favourite images as it was taken in St Malo, France. I feel as if this makes the image more interesting than an image just being taken in Jersey. I reduced the brightness to -70 and the contrast to -21 as I felt the original image was too bright and warm, and I wanted to show off the shadows.

Arnold Newman

• Arnold Newman was born March 3rd, 1918 in New York City.
• He was raised and attended schools in Atlantic City, N.J. and Miami Beach, FL. He studied art under a scholarship at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL from 1936 to 1938.
• Newman began his career in photography shortly after working at chain portrait studios in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and West Palm Beach. He immediately began working in abstract and documentary photography on his own.
• He then went on to work in Environmental Portraiture where he would normally capture his subjects in their most familiar surroundings with representative visual elements showing their professions and personalities.
• Arnold Newman found his vision in the empathy he felt for artists and their work. He photographed many famous people such as John F. Kennedy, Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, Ronald Reagan, and Audrey Hepburn.
• However he also  maintained that even if the subject is not known, or is already forgotten, the photograph itself must still excite and interest the viewer.
• He died in New York City on June 6th, 2006.

“I didn’t just want to make a photograph with some things in the background,”

 “The surroundings had to add to the composition and the understanding of the person. No matter who the subject was, it had to be an interesting photograph. Just to simply do a portrait of a famous person doesn’t mean a thing.”

Image Analysis

I believe he may have used a fast shutter speed as he was able to capture the smoke in the air of the image.

All light in this image is artificial which gives it a staged feel, this is suitable as the musician in the photo is on a stage where he would normally be in his career.

The image as a whole is in black and white with a high contrast that features all shades from light to dark. This could be considered to be included in the Ansel Adams Zone System.

The image is under exposed as it appears darker. This shows off the contrast of the image. Focus is down the centre of the photo where the subject is lit up.

The camera used may have had a wide depth of field and a small aperture which gave the  background a slight blur.

The man in the photo is Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith who was  an American jazz pianist at the time the image was taken (1960). He is considered to be one of the three greatest practitioners of the genre in its golden age, from about 1920 to 1943.

Anthony Kurtz

Anthony Kurtz is a Swiss-born photographer who currently lives in San Francisco. He specializes in environmental portraitures and landscape photography and strives to create beautiful and unexpected photographs of people and the spaces they occupy.

Combining both natural light and studio strobes, Anthony sculpts light to create a mood, an atmosphere, a photograph that tells a story and, hopefully, sparks curiousity in the viewer.

Kurtz has studied subjects from Science to Graphic Design, and New Media to eventually Photography. But no matter what the medium, he believes that his ability to meet extraordinary people is the best reward.

The above image inspired me to carry out a similar style photo of an athletic person with a dramatic sky.

Contact Sheets

Final Images

I edited the above images in a collection so that each photo added to the story of the subject in the photo, an athlete preparing to run. I brought down the brightness and increased the contrast to give the sky a dramatic effect behind the subject.

For this image, I edited it simply by increasing the contrast and reducing the brightness.

I took these images on a disposable camera as I liked the quality of them (an older family footage-style) and felt it would be suitable to take pictures of people in their environments anytime that I saw something interesting.

I did not edit these photos except to remove red eye from the camera flash, and reduce the contrast and exposure whilst increasing the brightness in the middle image.

For these Images, I took inspiration from Arnold Newman’s famous black and white images. I reduced the saturation then increased the contrast and decreased the brightness to show off the different light and dark tones.

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.

Ernst Haas 

• Ernst Haas was a photojournalist and a pioneering color photographer born on March 2, 1921 in Austria.
• Haas was uninterested in learning photography as a child, though his father tried to share his interest. Upon his father’s death in 1940, Haas first entered the darkroom, learning to print old family negatives. His interest grew, and he soon began to take his own photographs.
• Haas was inspired and fascinated by the natural world, and took photographs of the elements throughout his career. He used abstract elements such as shapes, textures and line and then edited his works using different colours by colour correction.
• In addition his coverage of events around the globe after World War II made him an early innovator in color photography. His images were the subject of the first single-artist exhibition of color photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
• His book The Creation (1971) was one of the most successful photography books ever, selling 350,000 copies.
• He died on September 12, 1986

I was inspired by his use of light in reflections on the water to recreate the same style.

Moholy Nagy

• László Moholy Nagy, born on July 20th, 1895, was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school.
• He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and realized quickly that neither law nor military suited him.
• After leaving the army, he began to take evening classes in life drawing and soon moved to Vienna to join a group of artists. Although he had taken class’, Moholy-Nagy knew very little about art. A group of artists and activists named “MA” became his teachers.
• By 1922 he had started his experiments in photography and his first experiments were with photograms. His work was in collaboration with his current wife at the time and his friend, Man Ray. Only a year later, he was invited to teach at the Bauhaus School in Germany.
• Moholy-Nagy’s interest in qualities of space, time, and light were presented throughout his different media’s. He was ultimately interested in studying how all these basic elements interact.
• He died on November 24th, 1946
• After his death, in 1947 his book Vision in Motion was published. His thinking and style advanced photography as an art and even got his work into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1984.
  
  I was inspired by his use of the negative effect in his photos, especially when used on portraits to portray the style of abstraction.

Image Analysis

In the image above, Ernst Haas applies the Rule Of Thirds method to give the image an off-center composition. This gives the image a more natural feel which is appropriate as the photo is of a street scene. It creatively makes use of the negative space by having the shadows of the man and cart to the left.

Moholy Nagy uses the depth of field technique in this image, giving the foreground a dark and blurred look whilst making the background in focus.

The image has a shallow depth of field with the focus on the background. This makes the street feel distant and empty however some of the negative space is invaded by the black bars in the foreground to counteract this.

My Work

 

Edits

I liked the two images above and decided to edit it into one as if the legs had gone through the water and came back out at the top of the photo.

 I made two versions of this image. On one I used the rule of thirds to make use of the dark negative space in the background to give the subject the focus. I cropped the other to show off more of the abstract detail in the facial features.

 

I decided to play around with other filters like the negative one such as infrared.

I used overlays of shapes with less opacity , like Moholy Nagy’s work, on a simple image like this one to emphasize the wooden planks that can be seen through them

I also used overlays of the same image like the one below but brought them closer to give a double vision effect.

I decided to see what this image would like if I made it negative.

I feel this image has an older looking style due to its grain. The shadows of the subjects push them forward allowing the focus to be on them.

When creating this image, I changed the hue to an orange tone and increased the saturation. I felt it emphasized the wavy line that crosses the center of the image.

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