Eugene Atget was a French commercial photographer who specialized in photographing the architecture and associated arts of Paris and its surroundings at the turn of the 20th century. In  the late 1880’s, when Atget was in his early 30’s, he became interested in photography. The earliest known photographs by him seem to be made in the north of France. These works portray rural scenes, plants, and farming technology and they were presumably made as studies for painters and illustrators. It was his fortitude to document the entire architectural landscape and street views of Paris prior to its transformation to modernism. By the early 1890’s, Atget was working in Paris, but it was not until later into that decade that Atget changed the focus of his photographic business to concentrate on the city of Paris—a subject that proved of limitless interest, and one that continued to enrich his work for the remaining 30 years of his life.

I did my urban landscapes photoshoot based off Eugene Atget and photographed cobbles lanes around Jersey.

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Shoot plan:

My shoot:

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My selected images:

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My final edited images:

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analysis

I like the final outcome of my images as I feel they represent Eugene Atget photos well. I created an ‘old’ look to my images by putting my images into black and white and then adjusting the hue/saturation according to how I wanted the final outcome of the images to look. I am really happy with the outcome of the edited images as I feel they relate well to what I was trying to represent. My images captured cobbled lanes throughout Jersey and old buildings.

Lewis Baltz was born in Newport Beach, California, he studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. He worked as a freelance photographer in California and taught photography at various institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, Yale and more. Baltz was a visual artist and photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. His work is focused on searching for beauty in desolation (emptiness) and destruction. Baltz was one of a group of photographers (New topographics) who shared aesthetic – minimalist and detached, traditional landscape photography.  Baltz images describe the architecture of the human landscape, offices, factories, and parking lots. In the late 1980’s, Baltz switched from modestly scaled black-and-white photos to larger-scaled color prints, in order to capture the massive spaces of in France and Japan.

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Image analysis

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Lewis Baltz took this image of a car park at the south wall in Costa Mesa. There is a high contrast of black and white in this image. The use of the high contrast of the thin black trees against the white negative space of the warehouse, gives a haunting and lifeless feeling to this image despite being simply a photograph of a warehouse. The lighting looks as if it is taken during the day as you can see the shadows from the trees and ladder, however the image is transferred into black and white. Their is a strong tonal range of the white building and the car-park floor. Baltz uses the lines from the parking spaces as leading lines to draw in the viewer as it it directly in the eye line and looks inviting.

Baltz liked to photography his work in a ‘grid’ format with straight and geometrical lines and most his work is created using two tones to add to the meaning of his work. He focuses closely on lines and space to create a minimal looking image which still has meaning behind it. In this image Baltz took the image face on to make the most of the parking space lines and so that the viewer can clearly see the strong black and white contrast. Baltz wished to find beauty in his everyday surrounds rather than the new industrial world being created at the time, he has demonstrated this in this image as he has turned something so basic as a simple car park into a image with a meaning.

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Both of these images was taken at the harbour near La Colette.

New topographics was a term invented by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers whose photographs had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

The exhibition brought together Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Henry Wessel. Many of the photographers associated with new topographics were inspired by the man-made, selecting subject matter that was matter-of-fact. Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. The photographs in the new topographics was a reflection of both the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

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My shoot:

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This is my response on the New topographics photo-shoots. I took these photos around Hautlieu and Highlands. I tried finding buildings that looked plain and similar to the ones in the new topographics.
I felt my images related well to the New topographics as my images where quite plain and ‘boring’ images. I tried to get the side of buildings and very square buildings to match the images of Lewis Baltz.

Ansel Adams was born on the 20^th of February 1902, in San Francisco. In 1907 the family lost most of their wealth in the financial crisis. Adams did not enjoy or fit in at school , he was a shy, reserved boy which led him to get bullied at school. During those hard years Adams took solace in nature, becoming lost in long walks in the forest and among the sand dunes that surrounded the family home.At the age of twelve, Adams found a new distraction in the piano, throughout the 1920’s Adams pursued music and photography equally. Adams believed that photography could give vent to the same feelings he experienced through his music. His first interest in photography came through his love of natural landscape and a want to capture something of that overwhelming experience on film.  Most of his early photographs were landscapes viewed on memorable climbs. Through the 1920’s, he worked as the custodian of the Sierra Club’s lodge in Yosemite National park, creating impressive landscape photographs. In 1930 he met the American photographer Paul Strand, Adams was deeply impressed with the simplicity of the images’ concept and by their rich and luminous tonality. This influenced Adams to focus on sharp focus and the use of the entire photographic gray scale, from black to white.

Analysis of image

This is an image taken by Ansel Adams at the Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.
In this image Adams placed the horizon high in the frame which gives favour to the landscapes lying below it. Having a high horizon helps the viewer realise the scale of this image and the mountains, in comparison to the sky surrounding it. The white tips on the mountains draws the viewers attention to the high points of the mountains as the white stands out from the rest of the dark image.
In this image there is also a instant draw of attention to the winding river as the water has a sharp, glow to it. It is on eye level of the river which creates leading lines within the image. The river has different tones in, some parts are bright and bring your attention to the river whereas other parts of the river is dull and fits in with the rest of the image. Only having parts of the river being bright and highly saturated is effective as it isn’t overwhelming for the viewer and also doesn’t draw away any attention from the rest of the surroundings but still draws some attention to the normally dull river. The position of where Adam’s was stood means the river is flowing away from the camera which creates a sense of the river vanishing as it suddenly cuts off at a corner and gradually looks smaller as it gets further from the foreground.
The sky is overcast with parts of sun trying to peak through the clouds. The tips of the mountains are lightly covered by a thin layer of high fog making the tips of the mountains a bit faded and blurry.
Adams used a wide tonal range to create a deep emotion in this image and highlight the landscape stood in front of him. He highlighted the main points of the image and created very dark and dull sections in the image which creates the same effect a bright section of the image does. There is a deep sense of emotion within this image which is shown through the different tones used.

Romanticism was a particular movement in art that occurred during the first half of the 19th century. Romanticism placed particular emphasis on emotion, horror, awe , terror and individualism, along with a glorification of the past. Painters, poets, photographers and writers drew particular inspiration from nature and celebrated the purity of nature. Emotion and feeling were central in how it should be read. Looking back to these images from our point in time, we see romanticism is linked as a response to the industrialisation of the world. The whole of the Western world was transforming, at what people at the time saw at an impossible speed, away from the agrarian past to one of mechanisation. Romanticism as a movement came to and end when realism emerged in the late 1840s.

Romanticism was also used in many of the other art forms. It was used in art in the early nineteenth century to describe the movement in art and literature distinguished by a new interest in human psychology, expression of personal feeling and interest in the natural world. The overall characteristic was a new emotionalism in contrast to the ideas of classical restraint. Romanticism celebrated the individual imagination and intuition in the search for individual rights and liberty. Its ideals of the creative, subjective powers of the artist fueled avant-garde movements well into the 20^th century. The most common way artists would express romanticism in art form was through paintings.

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Rural landscapes are the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state. The rural landscape provides natural resources, wildlife habitat and inspiration. Rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside.
Rural landscapes surround both well-managed and degraded or abandoned areas that can be reused or reclaimed. They can be huge rural spaces as well as small spaces within built-up areas. 

When taking landscape images you need to consider many things such as lighting, camera settings, location and the viewpoint:

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John Stezaker was born in England in 1949, and currently lives and works in London. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1960s, and has since taught at Central Saint Martins School of Art. Stezaker is one of the leading artists in modern photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter.
John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Stezaker asserts that the images “find him,” not the other way around.

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My take on photomontages:

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It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who showed the possibilities of photo montages and the workings of the unconscious mind. In 1923 Aleksander Rodchenko , a Russian constructivist, started experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. Another person who experimented with photo montages was the German artist, John Heartfield. He reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s regime. Aswell as Peter Kennard whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality and the nuclear arms race between the 1970s and the 1990s.

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