Image analysis is very important in your understanding of photography. Both from learning how an image is composed or structured to the actual content and meaning of an image. You may need to understand or find out its social, historical, or political context.
Arnold Newman | Portrait of Alfred Krupp | 1963
Light: Light in the photo are coming from the skylight windows and from a single train light, the rest of the image is filled with morbid colours. The Harsh blacks and greys contrast the light colours. The image consists of lines of machinery and window leading to a window that hovers over Alfred Krupp’s head.
There’s a lot of repetition within the structure of the building and there’s light reflecting on Krupp’s head. All of the lines are geometric. This image to an extent has a shallow depth of field as Newman wanted to highlight.
The darkest part of the image surrounds Krupp and the frame that allows you to see the factory. Dark colours are constant throughout the image
I think that the elements of Newman’s photograph were purposely placed in such way to portray an implicit meaning of Krupp and his factory to be the angle of death.
Contextual Information
He inherited the factory, the factory created all the bombs and missiles for the Nazi’s, he was 14 when he inherited the factory taking over after his Fathers death
My Perception
Idea of the sarcastic halo, triangle shape with his hands, Lines all lead to the sarcastic halo, Angel of Hell and death, Lighting is coming from the sides creating a dark shadow around his eyes. He sorta reminds me of Mr Burns ngl…
He was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker Evans. His father was an advertising director. Walker was raised in an affluent environment; he spent his youth in Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and New York City. He attended the Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy, then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school’s library, before dropping out. He returned to New York and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library. After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929.
Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he made a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein.
In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals’ The Crime of Cuba (1933), a “strident account” of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. There, Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who lent him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not (1937). Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints with Hemingway. He had no difficulties when returning to the United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals’ book. The cache of prints left with Hemingway was discovered in Havana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition in Key West.
The Depression years of 1935–36 were ones of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1935, Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an “information specialist” in the Resettlement Administration (later Farm Security Administration), a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture. From October 1935 on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration, primarily in the Southern United States.
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writer James Agee and he were sent by Fortune on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text detailing the duo’s stay with three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the ground-breaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Critic Janet Malcolm notes that a contradiction existed between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee’s prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans’s photographs of sharecroppers.
Walker Evans
Walker Evans gained his eye for knowing what a great photograph was through the visual education of his painter friends. He undoubtedly became influenced by the great works of artists that his friends would probably talk about, share, and aspire towards.
Evans died at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975. The last person Evans talked to was Hank O’Neal. In reference to the newly created A Vision Shared project, O’Neal recounts, “The picture on the back of the book, of him taking a picture – he actually called me up and told me he had found it”. “And then the next morning I got up and I had a phone call from Leslie Katz, who ran the Eakins Press. And Leslie said: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Walker Evans?’ And I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ He said: ‘He died last night.’ I said: ‘Cut it out. I talked to him last night twice’ So an hour and a half after we had our conversation, he died. He had a stroke and died.”
In 1994, the estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of about 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress, which were produced for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration; these works are in the public domain.
In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
An environmental portrait is a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as in their home or workplace. They typically highlight the subject’s life and surroundings.
My mind map of ideas for the genre and idea of environmental portraits
Michelle Sank
Michelle Sank, introducing her project titled “Breathe”
Michelle Sank is a social documentary photographer, based in Exeter, in the UK. She was born in Cape Town, and left there in 1978. During her childhood in Cape Town, her family were jewish immigrants, who faced high amounts of antisemitism and witnessed the awful era of the Apartheid. Because of her experiences in South Africa, she became interested in documenting people and their situations both in the UK, where she is based, and elsewhere, for example the USA and Ireland.
Insula
Insula is one of Michelle’s many projects. These images were taken both in Jersey, as well as Guernsey.
“Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series, ‘somewhere between the novel and film.’ As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island”. Gareth Syvret
A potato farm worker, Grouville
A jockey, Les Landes Racecourse
Images from Michelle’s other collections
Water’s Edge Teenagers Belfast
This image, along with many of Michelle’s other images, has a very striking background. This helps to make the subject appear more striking, creating a natural focal point to the subject’s face. This photo features an overcast and slightly overexposed background, which helps to contrast the dark tones in the subject’s outfit. The tones in this image are muted, except from the harsh black tones within the subject’s outfit. The image is slightly cool tones, with grey and very slight blue tones coming from the sky and water.
The image also has a wide depth of field, and slightly lower light sensitivity, leading to a slightly grainy image. Furthermore, I think that by capturing thus image, Michelle is commenting o what it is like to be a teen in Belfast when the picture was taken, as well as class and social aspects – Belfast after the era of the troubles, and how it affected the younger generation.
My photoshoot plan
Inside Shoot
Outside Shoot
Multiple People Shoot
Location ideas
Condor Ferries Terminal, Skills Jersey offices, Local Corner Shop, Cafes, Shops such as Butchers, Boots, The Quayside food kiosk.
examples of walker evens’ object based photography
Walker Evans Image Analysis
This is an image by walker evens. it has been taken in the photographers style which he is recognised for in many of his photoshoots. This image has been taken from above in a birds eye view style. this captures the shape and shade of the image very well. the ground shadow of the object has been minimised by raising the object off of the surface by placing smaller objects such as small balls off tape underneath. This image is centred in the photo which ensured it is the only object of interest in the photo. This photo has either been taken in black and white or transformed into grayscale during the editing process of the image. This could have been to enhance the contrast in the image as back and white shows more difference in shade to colour images.
My Object based photoshoot
MY FINAL IMAGES
For this image the studio was set up with a white infinity curve to give the impression of an infinite white room. We had two flashing LED studio lights set up on either side of the objects at a roughly 45 degree angle. This setup eliminated shadow. The is because the one light shines on the other lights shadow so it doesn’t show. the camera was on a tripod to eliminate shake and blurring. When editing this image I lifted the contrast to bring more depth to the photo and create a more cast colour pallet.
On this image I used the same set up however we deactivated one of the lights. This resulted in us getting a more ominous effect due to the darker shades, larger shadows and higher contrast. In Lightroom Classic I brought the exposure and highlights down to prevent the reflection on the shiny surfaces overwhelming the image. This also increased the contrast between the now darkened background and the lighter areas of the objects.
This image has a old rustic look which suits the objects within the image as they are from the second world war. This was achieved by moving the lights to get more influential shadows and stronger reflections which I think makes the image look as though it is in water. In Lightroom classic I added more contrast to make the colours pop out over the white background. I also increased the presence to make the textures of the objects clear and show the items age.
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.
Walker Evans – Beauties of the common tool – 1955
Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to New York, he published his first images in 1930. During the Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting workers and architecture in the South-eastern states. In 1936 he travelled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine; the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration.
Walker Evans greatly influenced a photographer named Darren Harvey-Regan. Both artists paid very close attention to the choice of their objects, composition, lighting and exposure.
Living room, West Virginia, 1935
Darren Harvey-Regan
Darren was born in 1974 and is aged 47 and works in the liminal space where flat representation ends, and three-dimensional object begins. Harvey-Regan’s work has appeared in exhibitions and publications internationally and is part of the permanent photography collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Solo exhibitions include Metalepsis and The Erratics, Copperfield, London, The Erratics, Passaggi – Arte Contemporanea, Pisa, IT Phrasings, The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam A Shifting Sense of Things, Sumarria Lunn, London and A Collection of Gaps, Phoenix, Exeter. Darren Harvey-Regan is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and is based in London.
