Romanticism in the arts was brought in during the 18th-19th century as a movement, it strayed away from the classical art form and brought in the use of nature, emotion and imagination. It was used by painters, writers, poets and photographers later on, it was used as symbolism to show how nature has changed and how industrialisation had taken over in many areas.
Romanticism artists
William Blake was one of the first English artists who used romanticism in their artwork, he created powerful and unique images where he used colour and was able to create a lot of hand-drawn books. In Blakes last decade before his death, he recognised how there was a whole new generation of romantic artists who supported and liked his work for inspiration, these included John Linnell, Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, etc. Here are some examples of his work:
William Blake (1757–1827)
William Blake (1757–1827)
Further along, Samuel Palmer took inspiration from William Blake in his work which led him to becoming one of the most influential landscape artists who focussed on romanticism. His art mainly included watercolours and the rich, calm colours of nature, similar to Blakes which can be seen throughout his work. Here are some examples of his work:
Samuel Palmer (1833).
Samuel Palmer (1833).
This eventually fell into photography, which I will discuss below.
Romanticism photographers
By the 1900s, photographers such as Ansel Adams began to experiment with romanticism in photography. He photographed images of the American West, which he is most famous for and created the group of photographers we know today as f/64. He favoured dark contrasts in his work and focussed on the darker aspects of tones, which led to him creating Zonal System. Just as romanticism was used to show a movement within art, it can be seen in photography as Ansel Adams uses it to show environmental protection. Here are some examples of his work:
Ansel Adams (1942 USA).
Ansel Adams (1949).
Ansel Adams work also inspired the work of many other romantic landscape photographers such Fay Godwin, Don McCullin, Edward Weston, Galen Rowell, etc.
Galen Rowell focuses with colour mainly within his work with landscape photography. He captures the sunsets, sunrises and other various natural landscapes from different point of views. Here are some examples of his work:
Compare and contrast your work to your artist reference(AO1)
Evaluation and Critique (AO1+AO4)
Use this helpsheet to tackle your analysis and interpretation of key imagery throughout your project…
MONDAY
Ensure your images are organised into suitable folders in the M : Drive
Import images into Adobe Lightroom
Edit / manipulate in Lightroom / Photoshop
Update blog as you go and include screenshots of your process where necessary and annotate.
TUESDAY
Ensure all blog posts are complete (Steps 1-10)
Review and refine your process
WEDNESDAY
FINAL PRINTS
– Mock display: Blog post showing evidence of how you intend to present and display your final prints – make mock up in Photoshop – for example. a single image or diptych, triptych, predella, size A5, A4 or A3, typology-style grid, collage etc.
– Virtual gallery: Download an empty gallery file…then insert your images and place them on the walls. Adjust the perspective, size and shape using CTRL T (free transform) You can also add things like a drop shadow to make the image look more realistic…
File Handling and printing...
Remember when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to 1000 pixels on the Short edge for “blog-friendly” images (JPEGS)
BUT…for editing and printing when EXPORTING from Lightroom you must adjust the file size to Short edge for “high resolution” images (JPEGS) like this…
A5 Short Edge = 14.8 cm
A4 Short Edge = 21.0 cm
A3 Short Edge =29.7 cm
This will ensure you have the correct ASPECT RATIO
Ensure you label and save your file in you M :Drive and then copy across to the M:\Radio\Departments\Photography\Students\Image Transfer\Year 12 Anthropocene May 2022
For a combination of images, or square format images you use the ADOBE PHOTOSHOP > NEW DOCUMENT + PRINT PRESETS on to help arrange images on the correct size page (A3, A4, A5)
You can do this using Photoshop, Set up the page sizes as templates and import images into each template, then you can see for themselves how well they fit… but remember to add an extra 6mm for bleed (3mm on each side of the page) to the original templates. i.e. A4 = 297mm x 210 but the template size for this would be 303mm x 216mm.
Making a Virtual Gallery in Photoshop
Download an empty gallery file…then insert your images and palce them on the walls. Adjust the persepctive, size and shape using CTRL T (free transform) You can also add things like a drop shadow to make the image look more realistic…
Step 4: Create your own location or choose a template.
Step 5: Upload your images, put them in your exhibition, name it and give it a description.
Step 6: Present / view your Exhibition.
YOUR FINAL BLOG POST SHOULD CLEARLY SHOW 3-5 POSSIBLE FINAL OUTCOMES for ANTHRPOCENE, INCLUDING YOUR PRESENTATION METHOD
sequencing of images
grouping of images -grids , triptych, diptych, dioramas, predellas
sculptural / multi-media approaches
framing methods
blog (show examples of frames / borders + process)
clarity of final outcomes—which images are your final outcomes?
coursework round – up and evaluation
FROM THIS YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR IMAGES FOR PRINTING
Contemporary approaches to presentation :
Research and explore alternative approaches to presenting your final images. This should be an integral part of your concept…not a gimmick…ultimately, the quality of your photography will be the primary focus and your mark will reflect this…
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favoured sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph.
Originally working in the Pictorialist style, widely popular in the 1910s and 1920s, Adams encountered Paul Strand’s photography in 1930, and rejected his earlier painterly, soft focus style for a new “pure” and sharp focus approach.
Adams’s professional life was dedicated to capturing through his lens the forgotten and unspoiled wilderness of America’s national parks and other protected conservation areas in the West. He was a committed environmentalist and nothing short of an icon for the 20th century conservation movement.
Ansel Adams most famous photo goes by the name of ‘The Face of Half Dome’. On the chilly spring morning of April 10th, 1927, Ansel Adams set out along Yosemite’s LeConte Gully to capture an image of the striking sheer face of Half Dome, one of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic natural features.
Sublime photography – The Sublime is a western aesthetic concept of ‘the exalted’ of ‘beauty that is grand and dangerous’. The Sublime refers to the wild, unbounded grandeur of nature. The Sublime is related to threat and agony, to spaces where calamities happen or things run beyond human control.
Sublime photography moodboard:
Painting vs Photography
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840). Two Men Contemplating the Moon
Johan Christian Dahl (Norwegian, 1788–1857). Two Men before a Waterfall at Sunset
João Laet, 27 August 2019
In the top photos that are originally paintings the colours used are all slightly dark and dull which is very similar with the photography taken by Joao Laet of a burnt forest in brazil. All images have a lot of shadowing which creates an effect of darkness and danger towards the viewer.
The earliest known evidence of a landscape photograph was taken between the years of 1826 and 1827. It was an urban landscape photo taken by a French inventor by the name of Nicephore Niepce. landscape photography was able to capture something that until that time paintings hadn’t been able to.
Mood board
Fay Godwin
Fay Godwin was a British photographer best known for her black and white landscape photographs of the British countryside and coastline.
She began taking photos seriously in 1966 after gaining a passion for photographing her children in the early 60s, her work was influenced by books and magazines at the time. As an active environmentalist, Godwin makes the land in her photographs reveal traces of its history, through mankind’s occupation and and intervention.
early life
Fay was born in Berlin Germany in 1931. Her father was a British diplomat and her mother was an American artist. She grew up in various different countries surrounded by a multi-cultural, upper class and artistic environments which helped shape her passion and interest for contemporary arts and literature.
She settled down in London at the age of 21 but she was spending most of her time travelling Europe as a travel representative. After six years of wondering around Europe Godwin took a job at a publishers where she was in charge of commissioning book covers which helped her become a perfectionist when it came to her own books she published later on in life.
Fay Godwin, Summerhouse Hill and Channel Tunnel works, 1990.
this is a strong image as it shows good contrast between the hills and the sky the image has a darker outer edge which helps add depth to the centre of the image by establishing a strong horizon line.
I really like the way the textures in the image stand out in black and white due to the rubble and wear of the tunnel works and how the strong shadows create a good contrast between highlights throughout the image. Although the image itself is in black and white it has a warmer tone to it.
For this photoshoot I went on a walk by people’s park and the little woods next to it and took around 100-150 photographs. I mainly focused on the trees and photographing them from different angles as I liked the way they looked and thought they’d make interesting images. I changed my camera setting to monochrome because it makes everything look simpler and in my opinion the greenery looks better in black and white.
Contact Sheets
Contact sheets of images I uploaded on to Lightroom after my photoshoot
Here I went through all of my photographs and flagged them using P (images to keep) and X (images I wouldn’t use). Then I went through them again and colour coded them in order to get my final selectin. (red-no, yellow-maybe, green-yes)
As said in my Romanticism blog post, landscape photography is the art of capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors in a way that brings your viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them.
Examples of landscape photography
Major landscape photographers include Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Fay Godwin and Don McCullin.
My mood board; I want to focus on black and white images
The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed. Landscape photography is a type of photography that captures the beauty of nature, bringing the viewers into the scenery, setting, and mood in these outdoor locations. Landscape photographs also typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes. Landscape photography is done for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common is to recall a personal observation or experience while in the outdoors, especially when travelling.
Edward Weston
Edward Weston was an American photographer between 1886 – 1958. Weston began to make photographs in Chicago parks in 1902, and his works were first exhibited in 1903 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later he moved to California and opened a portrait studio in a Los Angeles suburb. In the 1930s, Weston and several other photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke, formed the f/64 group, which greatly influenced the aesthetics of American photography.
“Is love like art – something always ahead, never quite attained…” — Edward Weston
In 1937, Weston received the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer, which freed him from earning a living as a portraitist. The works for which he is famous–sharp, stark, brilliantly printed images of sand dunes, nudes, vegetables, rock formations, trees, cacti, shells, water, and human faces are among the finest of 20th-century photographs.
Weston made his last photographs at his beloved Point Lobos, California, during the decade from 1938 to 1948, 1948 being the year he was stricken with Parkinson’s disease. Point Lobos was only one of his subjects, though he returned to it again and again. His career spanned crucial years in American photography, and a restless pursuit of his art created a body of work that ranged over nudes, still lives, industrial scenes, portraiture, landscapes, and any other subject that touched his visual imagination.
“Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection…” — Edward Weston
Eliot Porter
Eliot Porter was an American photographer known for his richly coloured images of the natural world. his interest in nature was fostered by his family from a young age. He began photographing his family’s island property as a youth in Maine, before going on to study chemical engineering at Harvard University. After graduating in the mid-1930s, his brother the painter and art critic Fairfield Porter encouraged his latent interest in photography and arranged introductions for him with both Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz.
“Every photograph that is made whether by one who considers himself a professional or by the tourist who points his snapshot camera and pushes a button, is a response to the exterior world,” -Elliot Porter
In the early 1940s, after having committed to pursuing a career in photography, he moved from traditional black and white film to the new Kodachrome colour film used by magazine photographers. Throughout the following decades, he published a number of photography books, including In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World (1962), capturing the disappearing wilderness of America as well as the Galápagos Islands, Antarctica, and East Africa.
Throughout Porter’s career, he travelled and photographed locations of cultural and ecological significance. Among the locations that he photographed were Utah, California, Maine, Antarctica, Iceland, East Africa, Mexico, Egypt, China, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.
Image Analysis
Dunes at Oceano, 1936 – Edward Weston
I have selected this photo as I think that even thought its just sand dunes there are many different components to lookout throughout the photo. As you can see in the foreground there’s different dips and ripples in the sand that has probably be made my the wind which contrasts to the smoother sand in the background on the higher sand hills. I like how it seems the different textures in sand slowly decrease as you look further into the photo, for example in the very front theirs different lines which kind of looks like veins or roots that have appeared in the sand, here there is minimal shadowing and if their is any its more grey then a harsher black which is what is in the background. Towards the back of the sand dunes they are smooth like they have been untouched for years, but there is a dip in the sand which is facing away from the sun so it causes the shadow to be a deep black which immediately draws everyone’s eyes to it because its the darkest shade in the photo.
Landscape photography is the art of capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors in a way that brings your viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them.
Landscape photography is especially relevant in jersey where no matter where you go you are surrounded by scenery such as agricultural, coastal or sea views.
Justin Minns
His work
Justin Minns is a landscape photographer from Creeting St Peter, England. He incorporates weather into his work to create intriguing atmosphere using fog, sunsets/sunrises, changing tides etc. He uses different angles to create unique POVS of normal scenery such as beaches and fields. He also uses long exposure to create a cool effect on moving water over time as seen on the below picture.
Justin Minns
Paul Lakeman
Paul Lakeman is a Jersey based landscape photographer who specialises in coastal shots, often through the use of a drone giving unique perspectives on jersey’s coastal line in which he uses weather and times of day to enhance the spectrum of colour in his images.
How I would like to go ahead with this topic is I would like to once again capture black and white images of the rural landscapes among Jersey. I would like to mainly take photos of areas that include loads of trees and grassy lands as I prefer the darker atmosphere that is present in the area. I prefer photographs of the woods or possibly run down/abandoned buildings. I also like to capture that of ancient castles that lay among the landscapes.
