Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer who was best known for one of his portfolios ‘The Beauty of the Common House Tool’ where he photographed a variety of household objects using framing and lighting in order to create a visually appealing set of photos.

His work was consistent – each object being monochromatic, centred and taken from a birds eye view throughout the whole portfolio, accentuating the symmetry, or in some cases lack thereof, of each tool. In order to eliminate the objects’ shadows, he’d lift the object off the backdrop by using small balls of tape, helping the object stand out against the background despite the image being black and white.

Darren Harvey-Regan

Darren Harvey-Regan is a British photographer who was heavily inspired by Evans’ portfolio, so much so that he created montages of some of Evans’ work before sourcing similar tools and split/cut these photos in half in order to match similar looking images together, creating a new photo for his portfolio ‘Beauty of the Common House Tool, Rephrased‘.

For example:

In Harvey-Regan’s work, it’s clear that he’s been inspired by Evans, making sure to take care with the lighting in order to eliminate the shadows whilst keeping he objects centred therefore emphasizing what each tool looks like. Unlike Evans, he chose to use a plain white background, most likely to make splicing the images together easier and make the final result more coherent.

An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings. The term is most frequently used of a genre of photography.

MARY ELLEN MARK

Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled, fringes”.

LARRY CLARK

Lawrence Donald Clark is an American film director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for his contentious teen film Kids and his photography book Tulsa. His hard-hitting photography often portraits drug use, subcultures and teenage sexuality, his controversial representations of American youth culture are deeply rooted in his own upbringing.

MICHELLE SANK

Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She left there in 1978 and has been living in England since 1987. Her images reflect a preoccupation with the human condition and to this end can be viewed as social documentary. Her work encompasses issues around socio-economic and cultural diversity.

Environmental portraits can be candid or staged shots. Good environmental portraits will tell strong stories of their subjects. Their immediate surroundings will give the viewer insight into where these people are, what they do, and who they are.

An in-depth explanation of the history of photograms and cyanotypes: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-33-spring-2015/out-light-shadows

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide. The British scientist Sir John Herschel discovered how to create cyanotypes in 1842.

Hershel managed to fix pictures using hyposulphite of soda as early as 1839. In the early days the paper was coated with iron salts and then used in contact printing. The paper was then washed in water and resulted in a white image on a deep blue background. (Apart from the cyanotype process, Herschel also gave us the words photography, negative, positive and snapshot.)

The process remains as simplistic as it did when it was discovered, producing a white image on a deep blue background.

One of the first people to put the cyanotype process to use was Anna Atkins, who in October 1843 became the first person to produce and photographically illustrated a book using cyanotypes.

ANNA ATKINS

Born: March 16, 1799, Tonbridge, United Kingdom

Died: June 9, 1871, Halstead, United Kingdom

English botanical artist, collector and photographer Anna Atkins was the first person to illustrate a book with photographic images. Her nineteenth-century cyanotypes used light exposure and a simple chemical process to create impressively detailed blueprints of botanical specimens. 

Anna’s innovative use of new photographic technologies merged art and science, and exemplified the exceptional potential of photography in books.

Anna’s self-published her detailed and meticulous botanical images using the cyanotype photographic process in her 1843 book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. With a limited number of copies, it was the first book ever to be printed and illustrated by photography.

You can view images from the book …

MY CYANOTYPE

I created this cyanotype by picking up random objects (such as petals and flowers) from the floor in Hamptonne Museum and placing them on specific cyanotype paper then leaving them in the sun to develop for a few minutes, once they had been exposed to the sun I rinsed them in water so they stop developing and wouldn’t become over-exposed.

WALKER EVANS

Beauties of the Common Tool: a portfolio by Walker Evans, originally published in 1955.

“Among low-priced, factory-produced goos, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear ‘undesigned’ forms.”

– Walker Evans

In the July 1955 issue of Fortune Magazine, the American photographer Walker Evans celebrated iconic hand tools in a photographic essay, “Beauties of the Common Tool.” Walker photographed Tin snips, a bricklayer’s trowel, chain-nose pliers, and a crate opener which, in Evans’s eyes, were standards of “elegance, candor, and purity.”

DARREN HARVEY REGAN

In 1955, Fortune magazine published, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, a portfolio by Walker Evans featuring pictures of ordinary hand-made tools, such as a ratchet wrench and a pair of scissors. Regan was greatly inspired by Evans and used Evans images to create his own images

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.

OBJECT PHOTOSHOOT

In the studio we used a product table with a flash lighting system, a copy stand with flash light, and coloured backdrops with soft box lighting in order to photograph our objects.

COLOURED BACKDROP SETUP

We played with shadows and lighting to create images with different shadow compositions.

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OVERHEAD SETUP

We used an overhead setup for object photography in order to create images inspired by Walker Evans. It kept things efficient while shooting and produced clear photos as we did not have to keep adjusting the camera. We also used artificial lighting (flash) in order to minimise shadows.

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INFINITY CURVE SETUP

The infinity curve setup enabled us to take photos with a plain background and good lighting

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Hamptonne Country Life Museum is a unique insight into the rural life carried on in Jersey for centuries. The house and farm date back to the 15th Century. Jersey’s history of cider making is illustrated through the cider barn and the apple orchard. In the traditional farmstead calves, lambs, chickens and piglets show Jersey’s agricultural past.

Part of the grounds include Syvret House, a decorated and furnished farmhouse gives a unique window into 1940s rural life, including; agricultural traditions, day-to-day family life, language, religion and the experience of the German Occupation.

The Hamptonne farm complex takes its name from Laurens Hamptonne, who purchased it in 1633. The property is also known as ‘La Patente’, as is the name of one of the roads that passes it, after the Grants by Letters Patent received by its owner Richard Langlois in 1445, and by King Charles II to Laurens Hamptonne in 1649. 

THE HOUSES AND COURTYARDS

Overall the site is square in shape. It includes ranges of buildings built in different periods, arranged around two courtyards. While the farm has medieval origins, consecutive owners have made marked improvements to the living accommodation. The main buildings are therefore named after the Langlois, Hamptonne and Syvret families, who lived here between 15th and 19th centuries.

When you exit the shop, you enter the North Courtyard along the side of which runs the Northern Range – a row of 19th century farm buildings constructed to meet the requirements of the agriculture workforce, its vehicles and horses. It include a Labourers Cottage, Coach House, Bake House & Laundry, and Stables. Facing the Stables is a glazed barn in which important farming devices and implements are displayed. There is a walled vegetable and herb garden to the east, beyond which is the Hamptonne Playground and Cider Apple Orchard.

To the south is Langlois House, which comprises stabling and an undercroft on the ground floor, and a parlour and bedroom on the first floor. At the south-west corner is a twin-arched stone gateway providing access to the roadway. To the south of Langlois House are the pigsties and a spring-fed pond.

To the west is the Cider House or pressoir with its granite apple crusher and press; to the southern end of this row is Syvret House which consists of a kitchen, parlour, two bedrooms and a small cabinet. The House is presented as the home of a tenant farmer around 1948.

CIDER APPLE ORCHARD

To the east of the farm complex is the Cider Apple Orchard, which consists of apple trees chosen for their sweet, bitter and sharp flavours to provide a good balance for cider making when mixed together. The footpath through the orchard takes you into a small area of woodland. Wooded areas at the back of farms provided an important source of wood for fuel and building materials, while also supporting a rich variety of plants and wildlife. Follow the footpath down to the grazing Meadow and, if you wish, continue on the public footpath that joins the National Trust for Jersey’s Toad Trail.

Tom Kennedy

Tom Kennedy is a local photographer, who is influenced by the Dutch Masters paintings of the 17th century, including Rembrandt and Vermeer. His photos with living history characters focuses on using natural lighting to stay within the time periods of the characters.

Photography has come a long way in its relatively short history. In almost 200 years, the camera developed from a plain box that took blurry photos to the high-tech mini computers found in todays cameras and smartphones.

The basic concept of photography has been around since about the 5th century B.C.E. It wasn’t until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura in the 11th century that the art was born.

Even then, the camera did not actually record images, it simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down, though they could be traced to create accurate drawings of real objects such as buildings.

The first camera obscura used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It was not until the 17th century that the camera obscura became small enough to be portable. Basic lenses to focus the light were also introduced around this time.

JOESPH NICEPHORE NIEPCE

Photography, as we know it today, began in the late 1830s in France. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a portable camera obscura to expose a pewter plate coated with bitumen to light. This is the first recorded image that did not fade quickly.

For his first experiments , Nicéphore Niépce positioned at the back of a camera obscura sheets of silver salts coated paper, known to blacken with daylight . In May 1816 he produced the first image of nature : a view from a window (see above). It was a negative and the image vanished because in broad daylight the coated paper becomes completely black . He calls these images “retinas”.

Niépce’s success led to a number of other experiments and photography progressed very rapidly. Daguerreotypes, emulsion plates, and wet plates were developed almost simultaneously in the mid- to late-1800s.

DAGUERREOTYPES

Daguerreotype, first successful form of photography, named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre of France, who invented the technique in collaboration with Nicéphore Niépce in the 1830s. Daguerre and Niépce found that if a copper plate coated with silver iodide was exposed to light in a camera, then fumed with mercury vapour and fixed (made permanent) by a solution of common salt, a permanent image would be formed on the copper plate. A great number of daguerreotypes, especially portraits, were made in the mid-19th century; the technique was supplanted by the wet collodion process.

HENRY FOX TALBOT

In 1841 Talbot applied for a patent on his “Calotype Process”. To produce a negative, the paper was first washed in nitrate of silver then with potassium iodide, forming silver iodide. Before exposure the paper was coated with a compound of acetic aced with silver nitrate and gallic acid, forming gallo silver nitrate. The paper was rinsed and dried before exposure in the camera. After exposure the paper was again washed with the gallo silver nitrate, then a hot solution of hypo was used as a fixative. A positive print could now be made on paper treated with silver chloride. Thus, Talbot became the creator of negative-positive photography.

Talbot published the first book illustrated with photographs in 1844. The book, titled The Pencil of Nature, contains 24 photographs of genre scenes of everyday life and a text of predictions and ambitions for the art of photography. There are fifteen copies in existence, two may be found in the museum at Lacock Abby.

GEORGE EASTMAN

Eastman introduced the Kodak camera (also known as the brownie camera) in 1888. Thanks to his inventive genius, anyone could now take pictures with a handheld camera simply by pressing a button. He coined the slogan, “you press the button, we do the rest,” and within a year it became a well-known phrase

Eastman built his business on four basic principles: a focus on the customer, mass production at low cost, worldwide distribution, extensive advertising. Using these four principles, Kodak cameras became the most accessible art form as it was cheap and easy to do, leading to normal people taking pictures of everyday moments- this meant that photography became something less formal- as up to this point the main photography form that existed were portraits of influential people.

FILM/PRINT PHOTOGRAPHY

Cameras started being generated on a global scale in order to compete with mass consumerism, pictures were no longer formal- they captured memories and moments throughout the decades.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Photos evolved to the point where you no longer need paper, Digital photography uses cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors to produce images focused by a lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The captured images are digitized and stored as a computer file ready for further digital processing, viewing, electronic publishing, or digital printing.

Photography has evolved throughout history, whether it be capturing moments and memories, creating visual art, helping scientific research or promoting various products.

Photography has adapted to the modern age- scientific photography (including forensic) has never been such high quality, mass consumerism means advertising and promotion is consumed on a global basis and photography as an accessible art form is blooming with the introduction of smart phones and new hyper-quality cameras available to everyone.

Photography being used as an art form grew from technological developments where images are now able to be manipulated by photographers into ways that fit their artistic expressions. Modern photography is also influenced by photoshop, deception is easier to create which can be used for both benefits and disadvantages. Distrust in news sources, false advertising and the creation of photos where the viewer is deceived is a risk of photoshop as some people use photoshop in a harming way.

Studying photography is gaining knowledge about photographic elements and techniques. It is where you will learn how to take a “good” photo in a literal sense, with balanced light, a good composition, etc.

To practice photography means is creating art through application and creating good, interesting images. Practicing photography helps us to capture memories throughout life, recreating events, changing how people see things and becoming part of the crucial documentation of history.

I edited all my images in Lightroom, after organising them.

First shoot

Due to the lighting and weather conditions on the day, many of my images were quite overexposed – I combatted this in my editing by increasing g shadow and contrast as well as decreasing exposure.

Second Shoot

In this shoot I had difficulty with the screens in front of the tills – they added unwanted shadow to the image which made them quite tricky to edit – to combat this in the future I would maybe take the images from a different angle or in a different area.

Third Shoot

In this shoot, the same as the last, I had to trouble with the screen in front of the till. To combat this I tried to shoot slightly to the side of it. In my edits, I added contrast and warmth as well as saturation and vibrance to bring out the vibrant colours in the products inside the shop.

what is still life photography?

Still Life is the art of photographing inanimate objects which can be natural (flowers, food, plants, rocks, etc) or man-made (books, vases, glasses, jewellery) typically arranged in small groups. There are two types of still life photography: found still life and created still life. Found still life photographs are random collections of things that are arranged without any outside help, meaning you don’t move them to make your picture look the way you want it. Created still life photographs, on the other hand, are photographs of objects that have been arranged to look a certain way. The painting generally considered to be the first still life is a work by the Italian painter Jacopo de’Barbari painted 1504. The “golden age” of still-life painting occurred in the Lowlands during the 17th century.

Paintings with aspects of the natural world were so common in the Netherlands that, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch words stilleven and landschap were adopted into English as “still life” and “landscape.” Before the mid-1600s, though, the Dutch usually referred to pictures by their individual subjects such as “breakfast piece” or “winter snow scene.”

Found still life examples..

Created still life examples…

My still life photos

What did equipment did I use to take my photos?

Infinity curve

An infinity curve, also sometimes called an infinity cove, is used to create a stage with a plain, single-colour background. This approach serves several purposes. It’s popular with product photographers because it allows them to clearly define the subject of an image by remove the appearance of a background of any kind. The defining feature of an infinity curve is a lack of angles. Since an infinity curve doesn’t have any corners, shadows don’t gather in the background. The end result is a finished image where the subject appears to have been placed on plain white paper or a blank canvas.

Overhead setup

The overhead shot is a high angle shot almost directly (or literally directly) above the subject. It allows the viewer in on the action but still maintains character detail. It’s most commonly used in food photography to take photos/videos whilst cooking or preparing food.