Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940’s and 1950’s for his abstract colour photographs. He is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20th century. His career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. His efforts have put a mark on photography as an artistic expression. With his keen eye for things that are generally overlooked, Keld Helmer-Peterson opened a door to the hidden beauty of a world we thought we knew so well.

High Contrast Images-Black lighting

Keld Helmer-Petersen published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrasts of tone. In some, we are only presented with images that are black and white.  All mid tones have been removed. He created and found these images, using both cameras and flat bed scanners to achieve the effects he was looking for. These books are beautifully designed and encourage us to consider the space around the image and the accompanying text as integral to the meaning of the work.

Keld Helmer-Petersen’s Image

This image looks like it has been taken of an industrial area/structure. I took inspiration from this image to create my own images below. I took an image of an industrial structure and used the threshold tool on Photoshop to try and recreate the dramatic contrast in Keld Helmer-Petersens work.

My Images

Before and After

I created this black light effect image in response to Keld Helmer-Petersen by opening Photoshop going to image adjustments and changing the image to black and white and then adjusting the threshold to the level I wanted it at.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was an American Photographer who lived during the mid 20th century. He experimented with many forms of photography by using different exposures and motion blur. In his work Meatyard captures dark and eerie scenes using people in frightening ways.

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In my photographs i tried to focus in on certain parts of what i was photographing. I did this to try create the same effect that Meatyard crated in his work.

Photographer inspiration

Raw Images

Selected Edited Images

Favorite Images

These final images best show the exploration of surface and colour throughout my photo shoots.

The first two images of cars directly respond to Ernst Haas’s photograph of moving cars with a slow shutter speed.

The next image responds to Ernst’s water photography, while showing vibrant colours under the surface of the water. I used Adobe light room to enhance the contrast and saturation of the image to bring out the bright colours of the barrel and the leaves in the water.

The remaining two images show examples of varying surfaces and textures in photographs, along with the contrast between the bright brown mushrooms and the dark, earthy background.

The black lighting technique is when source of light in a photograph is behind the subject, usually creating a dark silhouette of the subject.

This effect can also be achieved when editing a photograph in a software such as Photoshop.

Some examples of black lighting:

My Images

These images are similar to the work of Keld Helmer-Petersen because of the strong contrast between the highlights and the shadows, only using black and white. This creates a silhouette effect.

A contact sheet is a piece of photographic paper on to which several or all of the negatives on a film have been contact-printed. They were an inevitable part of the photographic process until digital photography rendered them obsolete.

Contact sheets are useful/essential as the purpose of it is to be able to quickly scan a number of images to find the keepers or the ones chosen to be enlarged.

For this photo shoot I took inspiration from Albert Renger-Patzch. I took images of industrial type buildings from different angles such as, straight on or from a worms eye view. I then changed the images to black and white so that they would fit his theme.

Keld Helmer-Petersen

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who was inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch. He became famous through his colour photographs but he also published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrasts of tone. Some of these photos were only black and white without any tones as they had been removed.

Helmer-Petersen published his first photobook, “122 Colour Photographs” in 1948. His work was then noticed for its inventive photos, which he turned landscapes and buildings into abstract patterns. He embraced coloured photos as black and white photos were only seen as being serious.

My interpretation

Firstly i picked out 5 images which I liked and then I changed the lighting by using threshold, after doing that one of the images didn’t respond well and it turned into a black smudge. I then cropped the images to cut out some of the smudged areas and focus on the silhouette. With the photo of the boat i decided to invert the image and focus on the boat being black instead of white as that’s what Helmer-Petersen focused on, there were also some white dots so I used the black pen to colour them out.

Keld Helmer-Petersen: Black Light

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who was recognised in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs. In his book (Black light) he considered the space around us and the world we live in through abstract an contrasting images.

Images made up of prints, drawings, objects, bits and pieces. The third in a series of three books

I used Photoshop to create bold and contrasting images inspired by Helmer-Petersens’ work from Black Light. To accomplish this I used the threshold tool and changed the lighting and shadowing of the images below.

My response:

Keld Helmer-Petersen is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20th Century, inspired by Albert Renger-Patzsch. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. He continuously experimented and challenged the many possibilities of the photographic image. In 1956 Helmer-Petersen established himself as a professional architecture photographer, he achieved fame for his colour photographs but he also published several books of black and white images that explore dramatic contrasts of tone. All mid tones have been removed. He created and found these images, using both cameras and flat bed scanners to achieve the effects he was looking for. These books are beautifully designed and encourage us to consider the space around the image.

The threshold tool creates a silhouette and it flattens 3D objects and creates a strong, dramatic contrast between the black and white tones.