For this project I printed out various photos from a previous photoshoot and used the guillotine, craft knifes and foam boards to make different photo montages. Photo montage is is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print.
The two base images I used
Once I printed these photos out I used a craft knife to cut out the women in my portrait and placed both over a the background photo of old workers from Hamptonne given to us by Jersey Heritage. These will be
Final Pieces to be mounted
For this second piece I used a photo I took at Hamptonne which I then cut into three so that I could re-arrange them after mounting them onto foam board.
In this image I tried to reduce the yellow tones so I turned down the photo temp, I also turned up the shadows because I didn’t like how dark the objects on the shelf were.
I wanted to make use of the natural light coming in through the window in order to frame the objects on the desk and to make the greenery outside the window more clear so I lowered the exposure to make the surroundings beside the light darker so the light is more concentrated.
In this image I really liked how the doorframe framed the bed and made it the centre subject. I also really like the shadows and light in the image so I tried to make the shadows more visible.
This is one of my favourite images so I tried to do the most minimal editing for this image because I really like how the walls and light almost frame the chair in the middle. I tried to edit the image so the natural light was more included.
I edited this image so the natural light in the photo was highlighted, this involved turning down the exposure and raising the contrast so the main subject (the doorway) and the plants looked more significant in the photo.
I changed this photo to just black and white because I really like the contrast of the shadow between the two buildings and how the two building almost look attached due to the perspective the photo was taken from.
In this photo I really liked how idyllic the setting looks so I edited the image to have brighter colours to create an almost “dreamy” haze. I also really liked how the shadow stops just before the door and wall- bringing more attention to the top of the image- so I turned up the contrast so the shadow would be more exaggerated.
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:
A trowel and scissors have been combined together in order to create one final image
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.
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.
John Hershel’s cyanotype print ‘Lady with Harp’
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.
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.
Cyanotype print: Anna Atkins Asplenium Marinium; British, 1853
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.
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.
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.
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.
INFINITY CURVE SETUP
The infinity curve setup enabled us to take photos with a plain background and good lighting
