The next two pictures are finished double exposures.

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish Photographer who passed away on March 6, 2013.

He was born on August 23, 1920 in Copenhagen (the capital of Denmark) which is also where he grew up. He started taking photographs in 1938 when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present. The international prospect and an interest in contemporary art and architecture contributed to the fact that at the age of 23 Helmer-Petersen began to work with an abstract formal language. Inspired by the Bauhaus and Albert Renger-Patzsch, he published in 1948, the bilingual book ‘122 Farvefotografier/122 Colour Photographs’. Today, the book is considered to be a pioneering work in the area of colour photography.

Helmer-Petersen’s ‘122 Colour Photographs’ gave him a grant from the Denmark–America Foundation to study at the Institute of design in Chicago. During his stay at the school, he both taught and studied under the American photographer Harry Callahan. Helmer-Petersen began to experiment with the contrast in graphic black and white expression influenced by constructivist artists and their fascination with industry’s machines and architecture’s constructions.

Helmer-Petersen’s approach to photography was by and large experimental and explorative. He worked on the borders of what we normally consider to be photography. Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (which is a darkroom technique in which objects are put directly on light-sensitive photograph paper). His curiosity about pushing the limits of the media was expressed in several experimental short films, including Copenhagen Boogie from 1949.

In his last works, Helmer-Petersen experimented with digital technology. In so doing, he returned to the black and white graphic expression. From 2008 up until his death, he placed a variety of old negatives and found objects such as insects, wires, etc. on a flatbed scanner in order to treat them digitally. This process resulted in the experimental trilogy: Black Noise (2010), Back to Black (2011) and Black Light (2014) which was published after his death.

My response:

I have repeated this process for the following images to achieve the same style.

White balance is a camera setting that automatically adjusts the color balance of light the you’re shooting in so that it appears a neutral white. This setting can also be set to manual which lets you create your desired colour balance for a photo. For example, if you are taking a photo of a white neon sign you might want to set the white balance to tungsten which will give the white a blue/purple shade.

Renger-Patzsch was born in Wurzburg on June 22, 1897 and passed away on September 27, 1966. He began making photographs by the age of twelve.  After military service in WW1 he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In the 1920’s he started working for the Chicago Tribune as a press photographer. He  then left, and in 1925 he published his first book ‘The choir stalls of Cappenberg’. He had his first museum exhibition in 1927.

He released a second book in 1928 called ‘Die Welt ist Schon’. This is his best-known book, its a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations (a visual approach to a scientific concept in a precise, clear and objective way).  He believed that the value of photography was in its ability to reproduce the texture of reality. His archives were destroyed during WW2, and in 1944 he moved to Wamel, Mohnesee, where he lived the rest of his life.

My response:

In these photos I tried to to capture bold shapes like Albert Renger-Patzsch. I made all of them black them black and white to match the style, I also increased the contrast and decreased the brightness on some of the photos to bring out the shadows more which makes the shapes bolder. I also cropped the 1st and 3rd photos a lot as I wasn’t interested in the majority of the frame (e.g. I removed all of the empty sky from the drill photo).