Walker Evans

While a staff photographer at Fortune magazine, Walker Evans produced a photo essay titled, “Beauties of the Common Tool,” which ran in the July 1955 issue. Dr. Chris Mullen has scans of the five-page spread as published, on his Visual Telling of Stories website. Images of a reamer, an awl, a bill hook, an auger, various pliers, a couple of variations on a T-square ,some wrenches and a trowel were among the tools used in the collection.

Darren Harvey – Regan

Harvey-Regan first constructed a montage of Walker Evans’s images to make new forms. He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined various halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his final work. The montaged tools become both beautiful and bizarre objects, in which a ratchet wrench is combined with a pair of pliers and a Mason’s trowel joined with a pair of scissors.

Harvey-Regan finds photography that photographs objects – whilst in itself being an object – interesting as a concept. “It’s a means of transposing material into other material, adding new meaning or thoughts in the process. I think photographing materials is a way to consider the means of creating meaning, and it’s a tactile process with which I feel involved. Touching and moving and making are my engagement with the world and my art”.

Photoshoot

In our photoshoot, we used 3 different types of lighting: a copy stand, soft boxes, and flash. We used an infinity curve as well as coloured background on a product table. We used 1 and two point lighting, allowing shadow to be manipulated in our images.