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

This is my outdoor Arnold Newman inspired photoshoot. I chose to photograph my friend Ingrid in her garden as it is a place where she spends a lot of her time during the warmer months, sunbathing and having barbecues with her family and friends.

Original photos – unedited

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This image is inspired by Newmans ‘Igor Stravinsky’. I loved his placement in the image and wanted to emulate it. I believe the placement of having Ingrid small in the left hand corner could symbolise humans subordinate size compared to nature, or Meer size of the individual on earth.

I love the contrast in this image of her light skin, hair and clothing compared to the ominous darkness of the vegetation behind her.

When I went on the Hamptonne trip, I noticed several interesting objects which stood out to me, so, naturally, I took pictures of them.

I chose this image because I like the way it is laid out, with the plant hanging from the top left of the image. I chose to make this image black and white because I wanted the shadows on the plant to be even more vivid, giving it more depth. The black and white also creates a contrast between the dark hanging plant and the light-grey background. I also decreased the images exposure slightly, which gave the background a grey-ish colour, which gets lighter the closer it is to the object, I like this effect as it makes the object stand out more. The background is fairly plain as it gives the object more of an emphasis.

I chose this image because I thought the objects and the patterns on them were interesting. I decided to give the image a low saturation because it allows the colours to stay in the image, while also giving it a older look. I like the way the colours ended up, it looks close to a black and white image, but the faint colours gives it an interesting look to me. The lighting in this image is very soft, which doesn’t allow much shadow to come through, this makes the objects slightly clearer, while the shadow that is seen gives them an interesting pattern.

I chose this as a Final Image because the objects inside the crate intrigued me. I wanted to make the pink on the artichoke stand out from the rest of the image by making it more vibrant and appear glowing, I wanted to make the rest of the image have less colour and vibrancy in order to make a more noticeable contrast. I think the shape of the artichokes gives the image an interesting look by not only giving it a lot of sharp lines and patterns, but also giving it more shadow. I lowered the exposure a fair amount in this image because I thought it was slightly too bright, I think this makes the image look more mysterious, maybe alien-like.

I chose this image because of its simplicity. I like how light is shown in this image: being at its brightest on the right and darkest to the left, the position of the light also gives the objects an interesting shadow. I think black and white goes nicely with the image as it makes the objects more vivid. I think the way the objects are almost in a line gives the image a nice composition. I decreased the exposure in this image slightly because I think it complements the black and white filter nicely, and also makes the difference in tone made by the shadow more noticeable.

I chose this as a Final Image for similar reasons as the first picture on this post: how the object is left dangling from the top of the image and how the background behind the object is plain, this allows the object to ‘breathe’ by giving it space in the photograph. Because the colour on this image is more varied and stands out more than the other similar image, I decided to emphasise that colour by increasing the contrast and exposure slightly, making the reds and greens far more noticeable. I also made the lighting ever-so-slightly warmer to make the colours appear brighter and more healthy.

I chose this as a Final Image because I like how it has a lot of colour, probably one of the most colourful images in the photoshoot. When editing, I made the colour of the grass slightly darker, I did this because I not only prefer the darker, slightly blue-ish colour, but also because it makes the apples and leaves on the floor stand out, this makes the apples in particular look almost gem-like and creates a very noticeable or sudden difference in colour.

I chose this as a Final Image because I liked the angle that it was taken, as well as how the image is split between the beam the object is hung on, and the further away parts of the image like the barrels and the wall. I decided to make the image darker because I thought that the shadows were not as clear as they could be, it also creates a bigger difference in tone between the left/centre side (the beam and the object) and the right side. I made the lighting in the image slightly colder to give the image a wintery look.