Above are two rural landscape images. The image on the left was shot by American photographer Ansell Adams and the right by myself.
Both images feature a low key, greyscale profile. The use of an ND filter and specific film allowed Adams to create an image with dominant dark tones whilst still allowing for the counteractive sharp highlights to come through in the image. I recreated this by shooting with a large aperture to include as much data in the image as possible and then altering the saturation and temperature of the image in post production. These methods allow for both images to feature a highly romanticized landscape. For example the dramatic moon in the center of a dark, almost fully black sky tucked behind a whisping blanket of clouds which are being pierced by a gathering of sharp snowy mountains is a typical depiction of an exaggerated, sublime landscape.
Both images feature a large tonal range from the dark sky’s and foliage to the white mountains and sand dunes.
Both images have similar form with the empty sky taking up two thirds of the image with the bottom of the image being filled.
They both contain a strong leading line horizontally through the image
Conceptually, both these images represent the idea of death and moving on. The images both feature dark, mournful tones. Adams image features a graveyard symbolizing death and my image contains a sublime landscape which was once flourishing but is now more baron symbolizing life and death. The images both feature bold horizons which alludes to the idea of “new horizons” and moving on from death.
You may wish to intergrate the concept of altered landscapes into your project based on Anthropocene.
You could develop a set, sequence or group of final images.
You may choose to employ a range of creative and experimental techniques (digital and traditional) to create your new environments…
Creating changed, changing or altered landscapes
Creating altered landscapes by combining a range of images in Adobe Photoshop
Explore panoramic landscapes
Using photo montage/cut-n-paste techniques and printed matter (combine your own images with images from the internet, magazines, print-outs, newspapers etc)
You may already have a range of suitable images to start your designs…but may need to find additional images to work from:
Here are some examples to help inspire your ideas…
Tanja Deman
David Hockney inspired “joiner” photographs
3-d / dioramas
Dafna Talmor’s Constructed Landscapes
Felicity Hammond
Beomsik Won
Surrealist approaches
Jesse Treece
Krista Svalbonas
Paint directly onto photographs, as in these works by Gerhard Richter:
Gerhard Richter has painted over 500 of his own photographs (with many more works discarded): commercially printed images that are overpainted with spontaneous gestural smears, using leftover oil paint applied with palette knives, squeegees or doctors’ blades. In the examples above, the thick painted lines divide the composition and inject colour into what is otherwise a rather drab interior scene. The paint disturbs the viewer – shatters the illusion that we are quietly observing a scene – pulling our attention to the tactile surface and smear of texture in front of our eyes.
Combine paint and photographs digitally, like Fabienne Rivory‘s LaBokoff project:
This project by Fabienne Rivory explores interactions between imagination and reality. Selecting photographs that represent a memory, Fabienne digitally overlays a gouache or ink painting, introducing an intense vibrant colour to the work. Students might like to experiment with this idea by creating a photocopy of a work and applying ink or watercolours directly (watery mediums will not ‘adhere’ to an ordinary photography surface).
Overlay multiple photos from slightly different angles, like these experimental photographs by Stephanie Jung:
Stephanie Jung creates stunning urban landscapes, overlaying near-identical city scenes that have been taken from slightly different angles, at different transparencies and colour intensities. The repeated forms (buildings / vehicles / street signs) suggest echoed memories, vibrations of life; the ebb and flow of time.
Cut out shapes and insert coloured paper, as in these photographs by Micah Danges:
These landscape photographs by contemporary photographer Micah Danges have separate photographic layers and incorporate stylised abstract elements. The simple strategy of cutting pieces out of a photograph and adding layers of different paper can be a great technique for high school photography students.
Make an photography collage using masking tape, like Iosif Kiraly:
Whereas the previous photomontage montages involve precise trimming and arrangement of forms, this collage has an informal aesthetic, with visible pieces of masking tape holding it together. This can be a great method for shifting and moving pieces until the work is well balanced and cohesive. Iosif Kiraly’s work explores the relationship between perception, time and memory.
Photograph a single scene over time and join the pieces in sequence, like these composite photographs by Fong Qi Wei:
These photographs are from Fong Qi Wei’s ‘Time is a Dimension’ series, and show digital slices of photographs taken over several hours at one location. The shots above show a seaside in sunrise, with the images organised together in a way that shows the changing light conditions.
Inset scenes within other scenes, as in these photographs by Richard Koenig:
Richard Koenig hangs a print and rephotographs this in its new location, creating intriguing illusions of space within space. Perspective lines within the two images are aligned to create optical confusion, so the viewer is disconcerted and unsure about the separation of the two spaces. His work often features intimate, private moments inset within generic, impersonal, public environment.
‘The Great Wave’, the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur […] At the horizon, the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates the join between two separate negatives […]Most photographers found it impossible to achieve proper exposure for both landscape and sky in a single picture. This usually meant sacrificing the sky, which was then over-exposed. Le Gray’s innovation was to print some of the seascapes from two separate negatives – one exposed for the sea, the other for the sky – on a single sheet of paper.
This ongoing body of work consists of staged landscapes made of collaged and montaged colour negatives shot across different locations, merged and transformed through the act of slicing and splicing […] ‘Constructed Landscapes’ references early Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with film […] the work also engages with contemporary discourses on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status.
Blog Posts This Week…
Research Altered Landscapes and produce a definition/explain what they are.
Produce a Case Study about your chosen altered landscape photographer, include an analysis of one key image. Explain/show how this has inspired your ideas and process.
Show your images, process, editing, selection, final outcomes and evaluation.
Possible aspects of the anthropocene you could look at and explore include…
Clothing / fast fashion – cheap and disposable, synthetic fabrics
Industrial Farming – over production that is harmful to the land and animals
Commercial Fishing – by-catch issues, disturbance of sea bed
Single use plastics – unnecessary (?) and difficult to dispose of
Fossil fuels – heating, transport etc – harmful carbon emissions
De-forestation – usually to create farming areas but leads to land instability and global warming
Fly-tipping – often bulky / harmful products
Chemical waste / pollution – rivers and oceans become tainted and polluted
Cement production – massive energy consumption and release of harmful gases
Over-development – cluttered infra-structures
Generating ideas using binary opposites…
Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory in Linquistics (scientific study of language) According to Ferdinand de Saussure, binary opposition is the system by which, in language and thought, two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another. Using binary opposites can often be very helpful in generating ideas for a photographic project as it provides a framework – a set of boundaries to work within. You could make work about ANTHROPOCENE by exploring a problem versus a solution and vice versa…
Look carefully at these examples and think carefully about how they could be responses to your theme…
An “erratic” is a rock that has been transported by a glacier to somewhere far from its native environment. When the ice melts, it is left there, out of place. In this series of photos and sculptures, Darren Harvey-Regan went from the White Cliffs of Dover to Egypt’s Western Desert. In the desert he photographed natural chalk formations that had been scratched and shaped by wind and sand over centuries. In England he collected coarse lumps of chalk that had crumbled off the cliff face. He made them into sculptures by carving them with a razor blade and shaping them with sandpaper before placing them on plinths.
ALICE WIELINGA NORTH KOREA, A LIFE BETWEEN PROPAGANDA AND REALITY
April 2013. While the Western media dogs Kim Jong-Un’s steps during his missile test launches, I travel 2,500 kilometres through the North Korean interior. Once arrived, the images I know from my advance research correspond with the scenes my guides proudly show me during their propaganda tour. But seeing these scenes with my own eyes, I gradually discover that behind everything they present to me, a different reality is hidden. While I listen to my guides talking about what invaluable contributions the greatly admired leaders made to their country, I drive through a landscape that looks haggard and desolate. During my journey I collect propaganda material and take photographs of the reality I encounter. This material is the basis for my multimedia project North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality. With the found propaganda images and my own photographs I compose a story that deconstructs the North Korean propaganda. Alice Wielinga www.alicewielinga.nl
Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas, 2012 18.9×16 inches. Archival pigment print on Baryta. Unframed. Edition of 250. Signed and numbered on reverse. Click here for more info on the Feedlots series.
Mishka Henner says : Coronado Feeders was the final feedlot I found after researching them for over a year. Vice magazine were featuring my work on oil fields and feedlots and the US picture editor, Christian Storm, encouraged me to keep searching right up to deadline.
It struck me as soon as I saw it. Coronado isn’t the largest feedlot in America. With a capacity of 60,000 cattle, it’s less than half the size of some of the biggest.
The configuration of pens, run-off channels, and its lagoon of cattle bodily waste is much the same as any other feedlot. What these elements represent is an efficient method for maximizing the meat yield of a living animal in the minimum amount of time for the highest profit…
Sea Change explores tidal changes around coastal Britain. These transitions provide an ever changing environment that is integral to Island Britain’s history and sea-going way of life.
Peter Mitchell got to know Leeds as a struggling artist, working as truck driver at times…and constantly re-visiting places that he saw were changing over time. Whole communities gave way to development, new industry and transport networks. “A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission” was published 40 years after conception…and now Leeds has changed beyond recognition. Mitchell’s photography have a painterly quality to them ; a sombre palette and considered compositions, but juxtapose the old and the new as well as the empty spaces created by change.
Robin Friend
In The Bastard Countryside Robin Friend presents evidence of a broken planet, over-consumption, waste and a lack of love and respect for the environment on our doorstep…
Thom and Beth Atkinson
Marking 75 years since the outbreak of the Blitz, Thom and Beth Atkinson’s first photobook, Missing Buildings, seeks to preserve the physical and psychological landscapes of the Second World War in London.
Over a million of London’s buildings were destroyed or damaged by bombing between 1940 and 1945. From the mysterious gap in a suburban terrace, to the incongruous post-war inner city estate, Missing Buildings reveals London as a vast archeological site, bearing the visible scars of its violent wartime past. But this book is more than a simple record of bombsites; to the artists’ generation, the war is the distant story of an epic battle, passed down to them through books, images and grandparents’ memories.
Blurring fact and fiction, Missing Buildings searches for this mythology, revealing strange apparitions of the past as they resurface in the architecture of the modern-day city. Missing Buildings asks us to contemplate the effects of war upon the British psyche and suggests that the power wrought on our imaginations by the Blitz is a legacy as profound as the physical damage it caused.
Eugene Atget and Gentrification
Working in and around Paris for some 35 years, in a career that bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, Eugène Atget created an encyclopedic, idiosyncratic lived portrait of that city on the cusp of the modern era. Around 1900, Atget’s focus shifted. The city’s urban landscape had been recently reshaped by the modernization campaign known as Haussmannization—a necessarily destructive process led by (and named after) Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann that saw Paris’s medieval neighborhoods razed and transformed into wide avenues and public parks. Those changes, in turn, kindled a broad interest in vieux Paris (“old Paris”), the capital in its pre-Revolutionary, 18th-century form. Atget’s documentary vision proved highly influential, first on the Surrealists, in the 1920s, who found his pictures of deserted streets and stairways, street life, and shop windows beguiling and richly suggestive
Joel Meyerowitz and New York 9/11: Aftermath
Comparison of images in New York; Joel Meyerowitz
Immediately after the harrowing events of September 11, 2001, the Ground Zero site in New York City was designated an active crime scene and closed off to reporters and photojournalists. Sensing the magnitude of the historical record about to be lost, internationally-acclaimed landscape photographer Joel Meyerowitz fought for access to the site.
Meyerowitz became the only photographer allowed to document the painful transformation of the World Trade Center site over time. For nine months he photographed “the Pile,” as the World Trade Center came to be known, and the courageous rescue personnel, police officers, firefighters, and construction workers leading the recovery efforts inside it.
Using both a large-format view camera and a 35-milimeter Leica, Meyerowitz made over 8,000 images around the sixteen-acre site where the Twin Towers once stood. His images show the mangled metal, shards of broken glass, and cascades of files and papers in the still-smoldering piles of debris; the riot of patriotic color seen in spontaneous memorials; and the elegiac silence of the dust that seemed to cover every surface in Lower Manhattan. Eventually, as his weeks in “the Pile” wore on, his subject shifted from the panoramic sweep of complete devastation to the intimate moments of mourning, strength, determination, and resilience in the faces and figures of the people on hand.
VanitasArt and Photography
Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death.
The term originally comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
Vanitas are closely related to memento mori still lifes which are artworks that remind the viewer of the shortness and fragility of life (memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning ‘remember you must die’) and include symbols such as skulls and extinguished candles. However vanitas still-lifes also include other symbols such as musical instruments, wine and books to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.
Paulette Tavormina
Inspired by the works of 17th century Old Master still life painters such as Giovanna Garzoni and Maria Sibylla Merian, American photographer Paulette Tavormina creates stunningly lit imagery of fruits and vegetables immersed in dark atmosphere
Mat Collishaw
A perfect example of the old technique getting combined with modern-age ideas is Mat Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row series of works. Although they appear as meticulously arranged staged photography still lifes of food, each image is actually based on death row inmates’ last meals before they are executed. Apart from the eerie subject, the pictures deliver a strong drammatic effect through an excellent use of chiaroscuro.
Krista van der Niet
On a much more lighter, even pastel note, we have Dutch photographer Krista van der Niet, whose compositions often include fruits and vegetables mixed with mundane objects such as socks, cloths and aluminum foil, giving it all a contemporary feel. Her photos often carry a dose of satire as well, which references consumerism and popular culture through a clever employment of objects within a carefully composed scenery.
Laura LetinskyOlivia Parker
Experimenting with the endless possibilities of light, self taught photographer Olivia Parker makes ephemeral constructions. She started off as a painter, but soon turned to photography and quickly mastered the way to incorporate an extensive knowledge of art history and literature and reference the conflicts and celebrations of contemporary life in her work. Over the many years of her artistic career, her style remained fluid, yet consistent
Richard Kuiper
Think paintings by Pieter Claesz or Adriaen Coorte, only in plastic. That’s how one could describe the photographs of Richard Kuiper, whose objects are all made of this everlasting, widely used material, including water bottles, floral arrangements, even the feathers. The artist tries to draw our attention towards the excessive use of plastic in our everyday lives, with the hope we will be able to decrease it before it takes over completely.
More Landscape
Light is the key element of photography. Photographers and filmmakers often capture both gradual and sudden transitions of light. Shadows from clouds pass across the landscape in pictures such as No Man’s Land by Fay Godwin. Other photographers show transitions of light over longer periods, such as Fong Qi Wei and Dan Marker-Moore, who record the change from day to night in film and photographs. Stephen Wilkes’ large scale night and day panoramas of urban vistas have the epic quality of paintings by the 16th century artist Brueghel.
FAY GODWIN, MARKERSTONE ON THE OLD ROAD FROM LONDON TO HARLECH, 1976
Fong Qi WeiDan Marker-MooreStephen Wilkes
Robert Rauschenberg
During times of stress and economic upheaval, the language of art can change reflecting a transition in the way individuals see themselves. This shift in perspective can even apply to a whole country. Robert Rauschenberg made politically charged collages in the 1960s that at first sight seemed to be chaotic assemblages of images and marks. However, these collages showed great compositional skill in directing the viewer’s attention and created memorable images that reflected the upheavals of the era. Rauschenberg had been influenced by the earlier collagist Kurt Schwitters and he, in turn, influenced other artists such as Sigmar Polke, David Salle and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Robert Rauschenberg Buffalo II (1964) screenprint
Examples of Political Transition to look at – communism – capitalism – consumerism – individualism
USSR – Russia
West Germany v East Germany
China
North Korea
Alice Weilinga
North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality (2013 – 2015)
Alice Weilinga works in places like Pakistan and North Korea ; countries that have experienced radical changes in their traditional way of life but still cling to the dreams of their ancestors. Political decisions have shaped the communities and their struggles, whilst the propaganda machines depict a progressive future. Weilinga explores this tension and questions it’s validity by way of intricate composite imagery that draws on often-romanticised imagery that belies forced and slave labour, amongst other issues.
Koyaniqaatsi
Drawing its title from the Hopi word meaning “life out of balance,” this renowned documentary reveals how humanity has grown apart from nature. Featuring extensive footage of natural landscapes and elemental forces, the film gives way to many scenes of modern civilization and technology
Felicity Hammond is an emerging artist who works across photography and installation. Fascinated by political contradictions within the urban landscape her work explores construction sites and obsolete built environments.
The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017The Space Between @ ART ROTTERDAM 2017
In specific works Hammond photographs digitally manipulated images from property developers’ billboards and brochures and prints them directly onto acrylic sheets which are then manipulated into unique sculptural objects. http://www.felicityhammond.com/
Lorenzo Venturi: Dalston Anatomy
Lorenzo Vitturi’s vibrant still lifes capture the threatened spirit of Dalston’s Ridley Road Market. Vitturi – who lives locally – feels compelled to capture its distinctive nature before it is gentrified beyond recognition. Vitturi arranges found objects and photographs them against backdrops of discarded market materials, in dynamic compositions. These are combined with street scenes and portraits of local characters to create a unique portrait of a soon to be extinct way of life.
His installation at the Gallery draws on the temporary structures of the market using raw materials, sculptural forms and photographs to explore ideas about creation, consumption and preservation.
Boyd Webb (born 1947) is a New Zealand-born visual artist who works in the United Kingdom, mainly using the medium of photography although he has also produced sculpture and film. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1988. He has had solo shows at venues including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
Boyd Webb Abyssogramme, 1983
Initially he worked as a sculptor, making life casts of people in fibreglass and arranging them into scenes. He eventually turned to photography and his early work played with ideas of the real and the imagined. Through mysterious and elaborate compositions created using actors and complex sets built by the artist in his studio. In later years his focus shifted to a cool observational style, his work less theatrical and technique less elaborate.
James Casebere pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last thirty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models that are subsequently photographed in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials, pared down to essential forms. Casebere’s abandoned spaces are hauntingly evocative and oftentimes suggestive of prior events, encouraging the viewer to reconstitute a narrative or symbolic reading of his work.
Caspar David FriedrichJames Casebere
While earlier bodies of work focused on American mythologies such as the genre of the western and suburban home, in the early 1990s, Casebere turned his attention to institutional buildings. In more recent years, his subject matter focused on various institutional spaces and the relationship between social control, social structure and the mythologies that surround particular institutions, as well as the broader implications of dominant systems such as commerce, labor, religion and law.
Thomas Demand studied with the sculptor Fritz Schwegler, who encouraged him to explore the expressive possibilities of architectural models at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer. Like those artists, Demand makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to reconstruct scenes he finds in images taken from various media sources. Once he has photographed his re-created environments—always devoid of figures but often displaying evidence of recent human activity—Demand destroys his models, further complicating the relationship between reproduction and original that his photography investigates.
The above is an example of where I used a technique called exposure bracketing.
This is when a triptych or series of photos of the same landscape is taken but each with a different exposure.
I did this by positioning the camera, with a tripod in the exact same place. I then took the tree photos but each time changing the ISO. The first photo was had an ISO of 500 the second of 300 and the third 120. I then sliced and collaged the three images into one.
Where – I will shoot the rural landscapes of the St Ouen Sand dunes and the Greve de Lecq woods.
What – I will look for interesting leading lines and romanticised structural elements of the landscapes.
When – imperfect weather conditions, later in the day
Why – To explore the idea of capturing the essence of romanticised landscapes
How – Narrow aperture, wide lens, small vocal length.
I settled on shooting these locations as they provide a lot of potential for exploring different viewpoints and ways of romanticizing them. The trees and dense, populated nature of the woods provides an abundance of the element of sublime, as well as a good light obstruction – drawn out shadows and gaps for light to creep in.
Romanticism was an art movement that originated in the late 18th century. It relates to the glorification of emotion in art. It was a reaction to the age of enlightenment and modernity.
Romanticism in landscape photography deals more with emphasising this emotion in the sublime and drawing out and exaggerating natural elements.
Adam Williams
Adam Williams
Adam Williams
Adam Williams
Adam Williams
Lou Reed
Lou Reed
Below is an example of romanticism in one of Thomas Doughty’s paintings from around 1830. It portrays the landscape in a way the human eye couldn’t see it. Thomas exaggerates the colours and the textures of the landscape.
Ansel Adams is an American photographer born in 1902 and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in landscape photography.
His work aims to convey the scale and the power of natural scenes. He does this in a unique way by romanticizing these landscapes. This means he enhances the landscapes past what the eye can see.
He was also a pioneer for a tonal system called the Ansel Adams Zone System – his photographs would convey a very large tonal range from true blacks to true whites in the exact same image.
He was part of a new wave of photographers in the early 20th century who divorced themselves from pictorialism and he became an advocate for “pure photography”. This is a style of photography which focuses on sharp focus high clarity and great tonal ranges.
He is known for his stunning landscapes of American national parks specifically the mountains he captures.
The above image is of the Snake River in the Grand Tetons in 1942.
The first discernable feature of this image distinctive to Ansell Adam’s work is the impeccable contrast and tonal range where he has captured every tonal level from the pure black in the foliage in the bottom left and some of the mountains to the pure whites in the river, the snow and the clouds. Ansell probably used a lot of burning when exposing this image to get these pure whites. Knowing Ansel’s past and his emphasis on the pure photography movement we can relate this to the above image with the emphasis on a high clarity crisp image with high contrast. This detail adds a sharp texture to the image which can be seen to emphasize the sharp summits of the mountains in the background.
The image also has a great depth of field. There are many components layering the image from foreground to background. The distant mountains contrast with the near foliage. The winding river adds perspective of depth with its ripples which create a sense of detail being prominent in the foreground, these details and the rivers size slowly diminish as it meanders and winds like a snake through the middle of the image.
The summit of the mountain is framed in the center of the image which creates a sort of aesthetic pyramid form to the image.
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features.
Landscape photography is a broad genre of photography, it focuses on the capturing of a this landscape scene and brings the viewers to this scene. These scenes can range from broad and vast landscapes to more microscopic focused landscapes.
They can be rural or urban. Rural Landscapes are subjectively delusive of anything manmade and they focus on the sublime and nature. Urban landscapes highlight mans disturbances on these natural scenes.
“Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” – Robert Adams (1973)
‘New Topographics’ are also widely known as photographs of a ‘Man-made landscape’, as they display the contrast of industrialisation into nature. This exhibition was curated by William Jenkins in the October of 1975. Jenkins recruited a group of landscape photographers including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gholke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel Jr. He also later invited the German couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher. The New Topographics movement projects the beauty of industrialism incorporating into the natural world, the exhibition had very mixed reviews by the public and some saw the art as a juxtaposing, pleasant view on landscapes with the mixing of industrialism and nature, whereas others believed it proved that industrialisation is ruining the natural beauty of the planet.
Examples of New Topographics
‘Pitheads’ – Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (1974)
‘The New West’ – Robert Adams (1974)
‘Untitled View (Boulder City)’ – Joe Deal (1974)
The movement of New Topographics was created almost in retaliation to the romanticism movement, that was popularised by artists such as Ansel Adams. The group of photographers wanted to photograph against the tradition of landscape of photography, that romanticism made unrealistic to the modern human eye.
The new topographics was the turning point in history in 1975 which was a shift away from photographing traditional landscapes, to photograph of landscapes that are unromanticised, industrial urban landscapes. This movement of new landscape photography was made because of the fact that society wasn’t recognising the issues of how the world was being slowly decaying from the natural landscapes being altered to urban, man made buildings taking over, raising awareness of the issue that was on the uprise. The photographers that where involved in this movement where 10: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel.
As you can see from the image above, this photograph is perfect in terms of the explanation of the “new topographics”. This reasoning behind this is because in the image you can see how there are industrial images as the main focus when you look at the image, however, if you look in the surroundings of these images you can see that there is some natural scenery in the surroundings of these industrial landscape images. This is because the photographers that where apart of this movement tried to get across that if society carries on with having urban/industrial landscapes cover up the world, we wont be having many more natural landscapes or even beautiful scenery to appreciate from what the world has given us.
Plan
Where – photo shoot will be taken around oakfield sports center and highlands.
What – I will be taking some deadpan images of industrial buildings
When – I will be carrying out this photo shoot during the daytime at around 1pm.
How – These photos will be taken at head height with the camera facing starring onto the object that i will be taking pictures of with the setting’s being exposure/80 and IOS/400.
Why – I am taking these pictures in inspiration of the new topographic in taking my own pictures to do with this project.
Contact Sheet
Final Images
From my final images, i got them to look so appealing in the compositions of black and white through editing. The process I went through in editing the images where making them black and white, then i went ahead and changed the colours that where in the images originally to enhance some proportions of the images. For example, it is shown in my images that you can see some dirt and textures that are enhancing from the edit making them appealing.
Comparison
Frank Gohlke
My Image
In both images, the lighting used is petty much identical, Frank’s image was lighted by natural light coming from above and behind the two focal points of the image which is directly above the structures. I know this because it shown in the picture’s that there are shadows on the ground in front of the objects on the ground. In my image, I used an aperatu
