FRANCO FONTANA’S LIFE AND WORK:

Franco Fontana was born in 1933 in Modena. He took up photography in 1961 and joined an amateur club. He held his earliest solo shows in 1968 in Modena, his native city, which marked a turning point in his career. He has published over seventy books with Italian, French, German, Swiss, Spanish, American and Japanese publishers. His photographs have appeared worldwide in over 400 exhibitions, solo and collective. His images are in collections in over fifty public and private, Italian and international galleries, including: the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, Rochester, the Musée de la Photographie, Arles, New York, the National Museum, Beijing, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Many companies have asked him to collaborate on advertising campaigns, he has published photographs in Time-Life, The New York Times, Vogue Usa, Vogue France, Il Venerdì di Repubblica, Sette del Corriere della Sera, Panorama, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Class, Epoca and others. Fontana has been invited to hold photography workshops in various schools, universities and institutes such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts, Brussels, the Toronto University, and so on in Rome, Paris, Arles, Rockpot, Barcelona, Taipei,  Politecnico di Torino, and the LUISS University, Rome.  He has collaborated with the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Japanese Ministry of Culture, the French Ministry of Culture.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:

This piece by Franco is very simple in composition, only consisting of simple line work, going along the rolling hills of the grasslands. There are large blocks of color which separate the photo into 3 sections, blocking each color into a section. Even through the photo contains a very simplistic color pallets, the colors merge and harmonize together to create an overalll “tied together”look. There is no real foreground, mid ground or background, therefore the landscape appears 2D and flat. The length and width of each block of color is fairly relative to one another therefore there is a slight sense of pattern and repetition. I believe that during editing, the colors have been over saturated in order to create impact and boldness. The natural lighting coming directly above from the sun, gives the image brightness yet lacks any sort of shadows or tone differentiation. Even though this is a photograph of fields, the image does not feel organic or natural in any sense due to the symmetry and geometry seen within it.

His reasoning for creating these images are “my goal is to interpret reality. Anyone can see the landscapes I photograph, but with my camera I try to capture the details and features that the eye cannot see. Some tell me, “I went to Provence and I saw ‘your’ landscapes”; sometimes they will have seen those places before coming to an exhibition, but only after looking at my work they see that part of reality pinpointing something they had not noticed before.”

CONTACT SHEETS AND SELECTION:

This was a very extensive and thorough photo shoot therefore i ended up with over 200 photos which i eventually cut down to 9 with the help of contact sheets. The plus indicates that the image is successful. The S indicates the need to further saturate the image, and the D indicates the need to lighten the image.

ANALYSIS OF MY MOST SUCCESSFUL PHOTO:

i felt that this photo encapsulated the formal elements that Franco explores best. Firstly, the main focus of the image is the bright and saturated colors of the sky and the yellow building below, which perfectly harmonize to create an impactful image. The light grey and brown roof tones down the image slightly, yet works well together with the blue and yellow. Like Franco, I captured these images on days with few clouds and strong natural lighting which allowed the bright blue sky to pop and provide a clean backdrop for the image. The light was hitting the building from the top left hand of the sky therefore no real shadows are cast onto the building. The image follows the  rule of 3, with the sky filling up the top 2/3 of the image and the building filling up only 1/3 of the image.  Like with Franco’s work, There is a slight sense of repetition in this image through the evenly spaced roof tiles and windows in the bottom third of the image. The repetition of pattern also makes this image feel industrial and man-made, far from anything organic. This image is also very flat and does not have a clear foreground or background giving it a 2D quality.

Whilst capturing these images, I set my exposure to 600, as it was quite a bright day yet i wanted it high enough to allow color to be bright. As there was plenty of natural light, I maintained my shutter speed at 1/60 which was enough to produce clear and crisp images. I set my white balance to direct sunlight as these were the conditions i was experiencing that day. The field of view in this image is very small, meaning that i zoomed in quite far into the building to capture this image.

WHAT I DID:

This is a selection of my most successful photos from a photoshoot i did focusing on the work of Franco Fontana. All the images below follow a simplistic approach, mainly concentrating on bold color and minimalist composition. I was not able to capture the beautiful rolling hills like Fontana has done, but I still incorporated similar elements into my work in order portray similar images.

Ernst Haas-Water

Haas  was an Austrian-American photojournalist and colour photographer. He incorporated his photojournalism and photography as a medium of expression and creativity.His father was photographer and encouraged Ernst, but it was only by his fathers death in which he became intrigued by photography when seeing his fathers darkroom. Haas used black and white  film for much of his career, color film and visual experimentalism became integral to his photography. He would make his own photographs, translating his passion for poetry, music, painting, and adventure into colour imagery. Once he began working in color, he most often used kodachrome, known for its rich, saturated colors. To print his color work, Haas used the dye transfer process whenever possible. An expensive, complex process most frequently used at the time for advertising, dye transfer allowed for great control over color hue and saturation. As the technology of color photography evolved and improved during this period, audience interest in color imagery increased. Many of the magazines that published Haas’ work, such as Life, improved the quality of their color reproduction, and increasingly sought to include his work in the medium. Despite this progress, many photographers, curators, and historians were initially reluctant to consider color photography as art, given the technology’s commercial origins. His images don’t have a focal point, the picture as a whole speaks, not just one area of the photo. He uses natural lighting to create the clear reflection, he has relatively low level of control due to the fact he can’t position the whereabouts of the sun, so his pictures may have been planned. His photos have contrasting tones, some areas are warm some are cold, his work clearly empathizes the beauty in colour.  When I think of colour in photography I picture a vibrant, detailed flower, but Haas, creates colour from objects such as transparent water.

I decided to use Ernst’s water photos as inspiration for my final shoot. I used the puddles of water on a swimming pool cover and on a kayak as a focal point for my reflections and ripples. My texture came from the leaves and water, my colour from the blue and red. In my first and second photos I was influenced by Ernst’s water reflection photos, I got my brothers to stand in the same direction in which the sun was shining in order to achieve the distorted reflections. Natural lighting was the easiest way for me to achieve the reflection, I found I had relatively low levels of control as the positioning of the sun determined the angles at which I could take the photos. I also found it hard to take pictures without them being  over-exposed due to the high intensity of the sun, the ripples however were easy to create and added a sense of structure and pattern. I had to crop all of my final outcomes in order to get rid unwanted negative space which interfered with the overall colour combination.

Final Outcomes: