Mood Board

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Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch view camera. Evan’s style of work is social realism and and today his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others. He is thought of as a pure documentary photographer as His precisely composed, intricately detailed, spare photographs insisted on their subject matter, and his impartial acceptance of his subjects made his work seem true and aesthetically pure–qualities that have been the goal of documentary photography ever since.

Examples of his work

Evans was inspired by his French cultural heroes, Evans set out to document the authentic, ordinary, and transitory details that he now saw in his homeland. It was in Fortune magazine, the publication founded in 1929 to cover “Industrial Civilization,” that Evans shared many of his cultural observations. He could not use a flash, because it would alert his subjects to the presence of the camera. In order to compensate for the lack of a flash, the shutter speed was slowed.

Darren Harvey-Reagan

Harvey-Regan first constructed a montage of 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.

On initial viewing, one may consider the works to be surrealistic, but Harvey-Regan refers to the works as ‘phrasings’, “different versions of a visual question or proposition”. He further elaborates: “If you take, ‘what happens if’…” as the beginning of the exhibition’s question, then the works explore how that question ends, by using the elements of the photographic material, the image, and the original object and shuffling these three around, giving different emphasis to each, in which each has a different phrasing”.

Artist reference

I have included an artist reference below to demonstrate how I took inspiration from other artists to assist me in creating my experimentations using the still life object photographs, Hamptonne portraits and Hamptonne images. I have chosen to compare this image of Reagan’s as it was the best to recreate as so many of my images could be adapted just like this one.

You’re going to utilise your images from the studio object shoot and the Hamptonne shoot.

Using your OBJECTS & PORTRAITS photographs to create experimental new images either by hand or using image manipulation software OR both!!!

Cut / Slice / Trim / Slide / Join / Add / Combine / Match /  Mix / Tear / Scrunch / Fold / Stick / Stitch / Sew / Weave / Holes / Burn / Singe / overlap

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Photographers you could look at include:

•John Stezaker •Bobby Neal Adams •Linder Sterling •Johanna Goodman •Max-o-matic •Luis Dourabo •Joe Castro •Bela Borsodi / Kensuoke Koike / Sarah Eisenlohr / Jesse Treece / Jesse Draxler / Joachim Schmidt /

http://www.artnet.com/artists/john-stezaker/

https://www.bobbyneeladams.com/

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/linder-10844

http://www.johannagoodman.com/#/

https://www.belaborsodi.com/

SOME EXAMPLES – CUT N PASTE

The examples below were created using five images. The figure was cut out leaving an interesting negative shape and outlined. Other images could be slid underneath until connections and interesting compositions started to occur.

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Photomontage

MORE ON PHOTOMONTAGE FOR YOU HERE

Extension Experiment

How to make a GIF in Photoshop
1. Create layer for each image
2. Window > timeline
3. Select > Create Frame Animation
4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers
5. Timeline > select Forever
6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720 x 720 pixels

A gif created using just three images.

For this photoshoot we arranged items given to us from Hamptonne by the Jersey Heritage

INSIDE

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BLACK AND WHITE

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COLOUR

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first I uploaded my portraits to the media drive

then I imported them to light room and selected them using p and x and refined this using the staring system.

then I selected the images that were 4 or more stars and switched to develop mode in order to begin editing them. I adjusted the WB and the exposure to give the image more depth. To make my images feel like they were taken in the style of Ralph Morse.

finally I cropped the image and adjusted the horizon.

final images

Ralph Morse comparison

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Although Ralph Morse manages to capture the job of his subject in the image I think I managed to give my portrait a similar feel through the angle and pose of the model. However the lighting in my image adds more of a dark feel unlike Morse’s where Eartha stands out compared to the dark background.

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This is a photo of one of the live history actors at the Hamptonne Museum. It shows the lifestyle of people in Jersey a couple centuries ago, how they dressed and what they did. This photo was shoot with natural light coming in form a window to the right and so its very yellow, warm light, creating a golden hue. The light only hits half of the subjects face mean while the other half is shadow. This creates a nice contrast. The white dress also contrasts the dark background. The line in the photo would be the subjects hand positioned horizontally as well as the shelf in the background. Whilst the hand leads the eye to the vase held by the subject, the shelve brings the attention to the background and the rest of the historical objects. There is quite a few textures in the photograph. The wrinkles on the subjects clothes are sharp because of the light and shadow contrasting together, this is eye catching and helps to bring the attention to the subjects. The rough and bumpy stone wall behind the subject brings the focus to the background. Overall, the photo feels cluttered since there’s so many lines and textures and shapes that make it hard to concentrate on one object, there isn’t much space, this is supposed to represent the living conditions of people back in the day when the houses were tiny and families huge.

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Here are my final images from the portrait shoot at hamptonne. I chose to add a cool tone to the woman next to the window as the light was hitting directly on her , and the cool tones bring out the bright whites of the skirt. I also did this because in those times, they wouldn’t have heating, therefore the room would’ve been quite cold all together. However in the portrait the top left (of the woman in the kitchen next to the fire) I chose to add warm tones as she is in the one room in the house with warmth. This represents the fact that, before the industrial period, they had to create their own heat to keep them warm and healthy, and i represented this through the tones of the images.

editing process

before vs after

A selection of my interior photos I took at our trip to Hamptonne farm, the photos of show have been made to represent the before and afters of editing which were edited using Lightroom