Both of my chosen influences display a common theme of loneliness throughout their work- something that I am aiming to achieve in my response to the theme Anthropocene.

JOEL STERNFELD

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art color photographer. He is noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. I have chosen Sternfeld as an inspiration as his use of colour while incorporating a banal aesthetic shows an unusual and somewhat surreal collection of images which tell a story. I want to try mimic this use of colour in my images.

JEFF WALL

Jeff Wall is renowned for large-format photographs with subject matter that ranges from mundane corners of the urban environment, to elaborate tableaux that take on the scale and complexity of 19th-century history paintings. His subjects are “cinematographic” reconstructions of everyday moments, fiction, and art history, which he refers to as “near documentary”.

TABLEAUX PHOTOGRAPHY- JEFF WALL

Tableaux photography constructs familiar narratives that refer to paintings, cinema, literature, and people from the past. In this way, it shows how contemporary life parallels with other times in history and in art. Photographers vary widely with how they create those narratives.

In Wall’s earliest photographs of the late 1970s and 1980s, clear references are made to some of the most famous paintings in the history of art since the Renaissance. Wall uses modern-day items and scenes to compose his photographs, but designs these compositional elements in ways that clearly hint at earlier landmarks, showing reverence to both art history and to contemporary artistic interests in the same space- as seen below in “The Destroyed Room” where references are made to Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting “The Death of Sardanapalus”

IMAGE ANALYSIS- JEFF WALL

Wall’s works are carefully staged and contain a lot of references, but are at the same time very accessible. With the use of transparencies mounted on lightboxes he refers to both cinema and commercial signs of consumerist culture. Through these materials and techniques, Wall has often been linked to minimal artists such as Dan Flavin, who is famous for his sculptural objects and installations using fluorescent lights.

The room photographed is staged, presented in a lightbox and created in a set used to represent a destroyed room. No apparent indications are given about the causes of the destruction, but it can be deduced that it was a woman’s room. The room shows a wrecked mattress at the centre, surrounded by women’s shoes and clothing, and other items. A cupboard, seen at the left corner, had his drawers open and searched. A small dancer figure is left intact at the top of the cupboard, perhaps as an ironic reference. The walls show also signs of destruction, particularly at the centre of the room. The left side of the picture demonstrates the artificiality of the image, showing joints and the external wall of the studio. The room itself is very light with the objects strewn around presenting an inconsistent colour scheme- adding to the mess of the room with the confliction of warm and cold colours. The image is taken from a middle point, assumedly using a tripod. The lighting is unnatural (as the image is staged) and there is a beam of soft light coming in from the upper right side of the image, showing itself on the back wall and presenting a shadow on the one intact object in the room- the small dancer figure at the top of the cupboard- which interestingly, compared to the painting Wall used as inspiration, the one figure in the same place (above the carnage) is also the one intact emotionally as they are not fighting