For my tableau and staged reality photography, I’ve decided to center my theme around gender stereotypes, specifically with women. I will be looking at what women were portrayed as in the 1950’s, with the photographer I will be getting my inspiration from being Cindy Sherman.
I will be basing my work off of her images, and may throw in a few ideas of my own. I will be using other people to replicate these images and show the gender stereotypes. Items for both images I will be taking should be objects such as aprons, old-styled dresses and kitchen appliances. The places where they will take place will be simple, either in a kitchen or by a door, like in the original images done by Sherman.
Images by Cindy Sherman which I plan to replicate:
Untitled film #35 (1979)
Cindy Sherman Untitled film still #56 1980Sherman 1977
Tableau photography is a static scene containing one or more models or actors. They are usually in costume and are planned out carefully to create a certain scene.
The term was first used in the eighteenth century by French philosopher Denis Diderot to describe paintings with this type of composition. Tableau paintings were natural and true to life, and had the effect of walling off the observer from the drama taking place, transfixing the viewer like never before.
In the 1860s, the concept of the tableau reached a crisis with Édouard Manet, who, in his desire to make paintings that were realistic rather than idealised, decisively rejected the concept of the tableau as suggested by Diderot, and painted his characters facing the viewer with a new vehemence that challenged the beholder.
In the 1970s, a group of ambitious young artists like Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky began to make large format photographs that, like paintings, were designed to hang on a wall. As a result these photographers were compelled to engage with the very same issues revealing the continued relevance of the tableau in contemporary art.
Lately we’ve been experimenting with lights and shadows and how we can transform a portrait into something interesting and unique. For this we’ve been using the studio and have been playing around with the different types of lights in there. We use studios in photography to control the amount of light we expose in a picture, and to guarantee an outcome that we want.
Pictures taken:
For most of these photos, I used the large soft light to create soft shadows. For others i used the spot light to clearly highlight the model, and used coloured sheets of plastic to cast a certain colour onto her.
I took these pictures with the intention of casting half of her face in shadow, or making the surroundings dark enough to illuminate her face. I had her faced sideways of the light, or faces towards it. I played around with angles, ISO, shutter speed, aperture, and lighting, and came out with three final images that I am pleased with.
For one of our studio tasks we were asked to try out Chiaroscuro, a lighting technique where you light one half of someones face leaving the other one shadowed. It’s an interesting way of creating something unique but not overdoing it, and its an effective way of adding some mystery and contrast to an image.
Contact sheets:
Chosen edits:
I chose these images because they show how dramatic the chirosuro effect can be. By darkening one half of the face to a point where you can’t even see their features and their face blends into the black background adds a bit of mystery to the image, you feel less connected to the person, however the highlighted part of their face stands out and is all which you can focus on.
Henri Cartier-Bresson 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.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother’s family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where Henri spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, Rue de Lisbonne, near Place de l’Europe and Parc Monceau. His parents supported him financially so Henri could pursue photography more freely than his contemporaries. Henri also sketched.
Cartier-Bresson recuperated in Marseille in late 1931 and deepened his relationship with the Surrealists. He became inspired by a 1930 photograph by Hungarian photojournalist Martin Munkacsi showing three young African boys, caught in near-silhouette, running into the surf of Lake Tanganyika. Titled Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, this captured the freedom, grace and spontaneity of their movement and their joy at being alive. That photograph inspired him to stop painting and to take up photography seriously. He explained, “I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.”
Moodboard
In this picture, you can clearly see the rubble of what were once houses, and the victims of the attack gathered around. It’s a grim sight to see, however while some of the children are staring at the camera glumly, other in the background seem to be ignoring what was around them and continuing on with their day, playing around and throwing things , seeming unaware of the photographer. The boarder draws our attention to the destroyed buildings in the background. Changing this photo into one without colour adds a strong emphasis to how grim this scene is. They’ve lost their homes and it seems like Bresson wanted to make their feelings obvious to the viewer.
I chose these final images because they best show the daily lives of people in St. Helier. They all seem to be getting on with their lives, they each have a place that they’re going to or a situation that they’re dealing with, and i think that aspect shows nicely in these images.
Street photography, also sometimes called candid photography, is photography conducted for art or enquiry that features unmediated chance encounters and random incidents within public places. Although there is a difference between street and candid photography, it is usually subtle with most street photography being candid in nature and some candid photography being classifiable as street photography. Street photography does not necessitate the presence of a street or even the urban environment. Though people usually feature directly, street photography might be absent of people and can be of an object or environment where the image projects a decidedly human character in facsimile or aesthetic.
The marvels of daily life are exciting ; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street – Robert Doinsneau
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a documentation of that performance. – Alec Soth
Street photography mindmap Moss Photography – Adobe Portfolio
An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings.
By photographing a person in their natural surroundings, it is thought that you will be able to better illuminate their character, and therefore portray the essence of their personality, rather than merely a likeness of their physical features. It is also thought that by photographing a person in their natural surroundings, the subject will be more at ease, and so be more conducive to expressing themselves, as opposed to in a studio, which can be a rather intimidating and artificial experience.
Contact sheets:
Contact sheetContact sheet
In the images I took, I aimed to get the subjects in their natural environments, doing what they normally do. I got someone driving, someone painting, and another doing their school work. These are all usual tasks which the subjects in the pictures take on in their daily lives.
Chosen best edited images:
DrivingDoing work
I chose these images because I feel they best represent the idea of environmental portraits out of all the images I took. As you can see in the two images I chose, one is of someone driving and the other is of someone doing their work, both being tasks they do in their daily lives. The fact that they’re turned away from the camera and seem immersed in their tasks adds a bit of reality to it.
Arnold Newman is widely renowned for pioneering and popularizing the environmental portrait. With his method of portraiture, he placed his sitters in surroundings representative of their professions, aiming to capture the essence of an individual’s life and work. Though this approach is commonplace today, his technique was highly unconventional in the 1930s when began shooting his subjects as such. He is also known for his carefully composed, abstract still lifes.
Born in Manhattan, Newman grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey and later moved to Miami Beach, Florida. In 1936, he studied painting and drawing at the University of Miami. Unable to afford continuing after two years, he moved to Philadelphia to work for a studio, making 49-cent portraits in 1938.
Newman returned to Florida in 1942 to manage a portrait studio in West Palm Beach. Three years later, he opened his own business in Miami Beach.
In 1946, Newman relocated to New York, opened Arnold Newman Studios and worked as a freelance photographer for Fortune, Life, and Newsweek. Though never a member, Newman frequented the Photo League during the 1940s.
Alfred Kupp, Essen Germany, 1963Leonard Bernstein, Philharmonic Hall New York, 1968
Arnold Newman Igor Stravinsky (composer) 1946
My chosen image:
Alfred Kupp, Essen Germany, 1963
The pictures shows an old man, sitting right at the front of the picture, looking into the camera while resting his chin on his crossed over fingers. Behind him, looks like a train station or factory, with machinery placed everywhere, and lights on the ceiling going back in a straight line. The image itself seems to be rather symmetrical, he’s sat in the middle of the image at the front, behind hims seems to be a window or doorway of some sort which almost resembles a boarder, and the lights and beams on the ceiling go down in straight parallel lines.
The man in this picture is Alfred Krupp, a German industrialist who supported the Nazi party and profited from the use of slave labor during World War ll. Despite being convicted of his crimes and sentenced to 12 years in prison, he was pardoned and only served the minimum of 3 years. In 1963, Newsweek magazine commissioned Arnold Newman to take portrait photographs of Krupp. Originally turning down the offer, he came to accept after being reassured by the editor, but promised to make Krupp look like the Devil. After travelling to Frankfurt, associates of Krupp decided to cancel the photo shoot, due to Newman looking a ‘bit Jewish’. In order to save the shoot, he demanded that his portfolio be shown to their boss, and it worked. The photo shoot took place in Kruppworks factory, and Newman used lighting and the scenery to portray Krupp as an evil man, with ghastly shadows and a green colour cast. Thankfully, the time it took to get the photos developed gave him time to fool Krupp and his associates, as they would have been furious with the outcome.
Lately people have been labeling my Krupp picture as the greatest photographic “knife job” ever done on anybody. But I’m not so sure. I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.
Krupp was a very evil man. You can read all about him in several books, especially the Arms of Krupp by Manchester. Krupp claimed during the Nuremberg Trials that he never knew Hitler and that he was a child at the time. This was bullshit! He grew up supporting Hitler. He married one of the Krupp women and Hitler allowed him to adopt the Krupp name.
He ran the Kruppworks using slave labor. He fed them half the calories Hitler allowed for no reason other than there was so much slave labor available. So what? If they got too weak to work he just simply slipped them off to Auschwitz and the gas chambers. Krupp still had slave labor living in his castle at the time I photographed him!
Later on in the War he built factories right next to the concentration camps where all he had to do when they got too weak to work was walk them into the gas chambers. It was that simple. This “slave labor” were people like you and I. ~ Arnold Newman
