‘New Topographics’ was a term used by William Jenkins in 1970 to refer to a group of photographers whose urban landscape photos all had similar formal and black and white aesthetics. They were known for having an ‘anti-aesthetic’ as they took formal photos of America’s landscape as it was without romanticising it. This was as they wanted to shift away from traditional landscape photography and draw attention towards how natural landscapes were being overtaken by manmade structures.
Keld Helmer-Petersen is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20th Century. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. His career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. He was very prolific and continuously experimented and challenged the many possibilities of the photographic image.
His efforts have put a mark on photography as an artistic expression. With his keen eye for things that are generally overlooked, Keld Helmer-Petersen opened a door to the hidden beauty of a world, we thought we knew so well.
Keld Helmer- Peterson
His work
From the 1970s, Helmer-Petersen was preoccupied with the figurative potential in found objects. Like Irving Penn (and at the same time), Helmer-Petersen walked sidewalks, head down, making discoveries among the windswept and downtrodden street refuse. This resulted in works such as the series Deformationer.
Helmer-Petersen’s approach to photography was by and large experimental and explorative. Again and again, he worked on the borders of what we normally consider to be photography. Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper). His curiosity about pushing the limits of the media was expressed in several experimental short films, including Copenhagen Boogie from 1949.
My Examples
Below I have included my images edited in the same style of Keld Helmer-Peterson’s, I think that this way of editing works well with images that have many bold lines and larger shapes, I found that some of my images didn’t have these features so editing in this way was challenging but overall a success.
Process: After selecting images to open up on Photoshop, I changed the images to black and white at first, then clicked on the Threshold setting where a gage appeared that allowed this setting to e changed up and down, to get the perfect final product there needed to be a good balance between having a plain background and detail in objects and textures in the foreground.
He began to photograph birds and landscapes with a Kodak box camera as a child. In 1933 he was powerfully moved by the photographs of Ansel Adams, who encouraged him to work with a large-format camera.
Throughout his career, he also travelled and photographed locations of cultural significance. The locations that he photographed were Utah, California, Maine, Antarctica, Iceland, East Africa, Mexico, Egypt, China, Greece, and Czechoslovakia.
His work
He developed a vision of the landscape that looked closer, caught the natural chaos of the wild but in a way that showed the hidden structures. He is the forefather of colour landscape photography.
He would frequently intensify blues, greens and reds while enriching the texture of trees, rocks and flowing streams to give his images a painterly aesthetic.
Keld Helmer-Petersen is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20th Century. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. His career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. He was very prolific and continuously experimented and challenged the many possibilities of the photographic image
Keld Helmer-Petersen is recognised as a pioneer of colour photography. His self-published book122 Colour Photographs, appeared in 1948. The photographs were ground-breaking in their use of colour as subject and their abstract qualities. As Martin Parr observes ‘…for the 1940s it was sensational – way ahead of its time.’
I don’t want my pictures to ‘look like something’. They should just look like pictures.
Keld Helmer-Petersen, Life, November 28, 1949
But significantly, over a career that spanned six decades, the vast majority of Helmer-Petersen’s work involved black and white photography – often portraying a very graphic sensibility achieved by exposing high-contrast film negatives.
editing process
final images
As well as experimenting with high contrast black and white images, I also experimented with colour gradients and invert to really bring out the shape of the industrial buildings.
I imported my images into light room and used a flagging system using p and x inspired by romanticism and rural landscape photography inspired by Fay Godwin’s work
I then went through the editing process for each image adjusting WB, contrast and exposure
I also cropped the images
Made some black and white to add contrast
I also used the transform tool in order to straighten up the images
Final images
comparison with Godwin’s work
Godwin’s work
Although my image isn’t in black and white I think I was able to capture a pretty similar image with the cliff face being the main focal point I was also able to capture the textures in the image similarly to Fay over all I think I managed to capture a similar romanticised aspect of a softness in the image.
Keld Helmer-Petersen stayed at the art school, institute of Design, in Chicago. He was both a student and a guest teacher and his future work was influenced immensely by what he learned at school. He developed a graphic black and white aesthetic.
He grew increasingly experimental, engaging in abstract studies of light in urban spaces as well as in the darkroom. He turned silhouettes and fragments of wires and steel constructions into rhythmic, dynamic patterns. Upon his return to Copenhagen, he continued in his graphic style, finding the steel world of Chicago reflected in harbour areas and railways.
for my first photo shoot I will go down to St. Helier and try to photograph new buildings and old buildings in the back lanes of the town and try capture aspects of different peoples lives and how they use the town. then ill go down old trinity hill and photograph the old fashioned buildings.
I used the star rating sytems to decide the good from the bad images.
Then I am left with my 5 star images which best relate to new topographics.
I took this image from the top of MT Bingham of the flats on green street I chose my position carefully to get a higher perspective of and over the surrounding buildings. i positioned the skyscraper slightly of centre of the image to provide juxtaposition to the the rest of the smaller residential buildings. I then used the vertical straightening tool to correct the image and changed the image into black and white to relate to the original photographers of the new topographical movement.
this image shows the contrast between the two different building designs, the contrast between the point triangular design and the curves of the the adjacent building. there is beauty in the straight and the organic cloud shapes which I increased the contrast to bring out. this photo is taken from a lower angle to provide a better perspective to the image. the contrast between the natural and the unnatural link to the movement because it is about the beauty that can be found in the everyday urban environment however i believe there is also beauty to be found in the average day, the pattern made by the clouds showing a unsymmetrical, un even, un predictable motif.
this really like this image because of the contrasting brick work and lighter window frames reinforcing the idea of the beauty in the mundane. this image is of the older wing of the hospital with its ‘boring’ square shapes so i decide to photograph this i would need to find a good angle to show of the best angle to create a god image from a seemingly boring building. i liked that this wall wasn’t flat and it had some depth, i also liked the pipes coming from the building back into the building. i converted this image into black and white to better match the original artists of the the new topographical movement.
i like this iage becasue a construction site is in the transition between natural
For these photoshoots I went to two locations next to each other to try and get ariel views of abandoned and disused places. One set was taken during early evening and the second was taken during sunset hence the different lighting.
These are my final selections after I had gone through and chosen photos which I had framed well, adjusted focus correctly and which I feel have reflected the idea of urban landscape.
Below I have gone through and selected the best of my images, I have demonstrated all three of my photoshoots through these separate contact sheets, I have also included the plans above the contact sheets so the layout is clear.
Photoshoot 1: was based around the harbour and along the avenue, the aim of doing this photoshoot at night was so that I could change the shutter speed to create interesting lines of light throughout my photos, and so that industrial buildings could be contrasted with their light sources.
Photoshoot 2: My second photoshoot was based in the fields around my house, these potato fields made for good places to photoshoot as theres is a contrast between natural landscape and manmade housing. I took these photographs during the late afternoon in an attempt to get more golden lighting.
Photoshoot 3: This photoshoot was based in and around La Mare flats in St Clement, I think that this gave me a good opportunity to photograph industrial landscapes and this links in very well with The New Topographic project. All of the straight lines and symmetry in these images make them more aesthetic.
Final Collection
Here I have created a quick collection of some of my best images from my photoshoots, I think i will add to this when editing and picking my final images but these have the most potential.
Editing
Below I have edited some of the best images from my created collection, and I have screen shotted parts of Lightroom to show how the images have been edited. In the develop section I have shown the before and after editing so the process I have gone through to change these images is clear. I have decided despite sticking to the romanticism theme I am not going to edit all my images to monochromatic, as I think that the colour and lighting in some of these photographs only needs to be enhanced.
More Images
Here I have included some more of my good images, as I think that they should be shown on my blog but they do not need editing unless they are changed to black and white as one of my final images. This gallery is to show more of my work from all three of my photoshoots.
