Keld Helmer-Petersen is a Danish photographer. He was an international pioneer in colour photography and was a central figure in not only Danish but also European modernist photography. Helmer-Petersen’s career spanned 70 years and he had strong interest in modern architecture, industrial areas and structures. He started photographing in 1938, when he was given a camera as a high school graduation gift. He studied the graphic and abstract effects of a photograph in particular. He was self-taught and studied technical manuals, journals and photobooks.

Throughout Keld Helmer-Peterson life he maintained a strong interest in international trends, not just photography – but also art, literature, film, music and architecture. However, he wasn’t only inspired by them, but also collaborated and socialised with architects, artists, writers and musicians as a natural part of his work as a photographer.

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From 1950 to 1951, Helmer-Petersen studied at the Institute of Design art school in Chicago. Helmer-Petersen’s stay at the legendary Institute of Design came about because of his first photobook ‘122 Colour Photographs’ published in 1948. It gained international attention and was recognised as one of the pioneering examples of art photography in colour. Chicago’s impact on his artistic development was clearly showcased in the book ‘Fragments of a city’ published in 1960 where the photographs were taken in the city of Chicago.

Up until the 1990s he was busy photographing urban environments and industrial areas in the outskirts. He was particularly interested in the area around the harbourside in his hometown of Copenhagen.

My Editing

Here I have tried to edit some of my photos in a similar way that Keld Helmer-Petersen published his. I used the industrial images from the photography work do this and I edited them in photoshop by using the threshold style of editing. I like how the colours and tones are simple but are intensified by the different elements of the photos, like the cranes and the different angles of lines that built them or the darker, more bold structures that standout against the white and lighter sky. I really like how you can see all the little details of the structures and landscapes as the harsh black is more eye-catching against the white.

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Peter Mitchell (born 1943) is a British documentary photographer, known for documenting Leeds and the surrounding area for more than 40 years. Mitchell’s photographs have been published in three monographs of his own. His work was exhibited at Impressions Gallery in 1979, and nearly thirty years later was included in major survey exhibitions throughout the UK including at Tate Britain and Media Space in London, and the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. Mitchell’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Royal Photographic Society and Leeds Art Gallery.

I will be inspired by Peter Mitchell, in particular his photography project titled ‘early Sunday morning’ this project, which was later published as a book focused on the changing landscapes and urbanisation of Leeds, England, Mitchell captured the layers of the city’s history, exposed by the changes to the urban landscape that epitomised the 1970s and 80s. Hundred-year-old terraces and cobbled streets sit flanked by concrete flats, with newly cleared ground to either side are presented with Mitchell’s typical graphic framing.

Early Sunday Morning – Peter Mitchell

I took 292 images then spent a long time going through them using the rating system to find the best suited to my artist reference.

final outcomes

Keld Helmer-Petersen was a Danish photographer who achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour.

the first image is a specific style from Keld helmer-petersen that inspired me to edit my own images in this style. i did this by incresing the blacks and shadows in the image to show the most contrast between the overexposed white sky and the underexposed scaffolding which creates a black and white effect.

I liked her style so I continued to edit more of my photos into her style. this image is of a duct running from the furnace. I thought the supports holding up the duct would look good in this style, that is why i chose to edit this image in this way.

this image is of the underside of the duct taken from inside the support so that I could get a very symmetrical view. I decreased the highlights in this mage to give more contrast between the ducts and the sky behind. i like the way all the different shaded of greys contrast against each other giving a good amount of depth to the image.

this image was taken from underneath the duct looking up to give a looming perspective of the chimney. i made sure took multiple images of from this perspective some with out the duct but I decided that the duct provides depth to the image showing a foreground (the duct) a mid ground (the chimney) and a background (the sky).

I like this image because the contrast between the hard white shapes against the vast dark expanse of the sky. I positioned my self dead on with the building to get more of a dead pan effect then situated the building slightly of centre of the image to give more contrast to the darker coloured sky against the building.

this image shows the barriers at Hav de pa and expanse of land to le Marie flats. i like the way the text is so bold which contrast to the rest of the image which is less sharp. the flat barrier also frames up the horizon which then highlights the development of the land and the high rise flats protruding from the horizon. i positioned these four buildings above the righting to draw your attention from the text up to the building with the large expanse of sandy midground in-between. I converted this image into black and white to give more contrast to the image.

this image shows a very industrial side of the island. I took this image from behind the large spiked fence keeping people out of this industrial area. I like the perspective it gives to the image. i took different images where the chimney was in focus instead but I then decided that I like the this image more because of the less sharp background contrast to the sharp fences.

What was the purpose of New Topographics?

“A turning point in the history of photography, the 1975 exhibition New Topographic signalled a radical shift away from traditional depictions of landscape.”

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Robert Adams

Robert Adams is an 84 year old photographer who has spent many years of his life documenting the damage that humans have done to the American west. Adams grew up in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado. research suggests that Adams was very fond of the outdoors and has a very close relationship with his father. When he was 25 Adams was a collage English teacher. this meant that during his long summer holidays he had a lot of time to spend outdoors and this is when he discovered photography. During the 1970s and 1980s he produced a number of books that highlighted the suburbs of Colorado. Robert Adams focused mainly on the mixture of the natural world and the influence that humans have had upon the natural landscape.

My Images in response to the new thermographic and Robert Adams

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An urban area, or built-up area, is a human settlement with a high population density and infrastructure of built environment. Urban areas are created through urbanization and are categorized as cities, towns, conurbations or suburbs.

mood board

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Joel Meyerowitz

Joel Meyerowitz is an American street, portrait and landscape photographer. He began photographing in colour in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of colour during a time when there was significant resistance to the idea of colour photography as serious art.

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 his early work consisted mainly of black-and-white street photographs made with a Leica, by 1976 he had turned primarily to colour photographs of architectural light and space made with a large-format view camera.

examples of his work

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I like the use of tones in this image and how the urban environment around is eye catching such as the empire state building that can be seen at the end of the horizon. The use of low shutter speed it shows how New York is busy and full of life as down the street you can see the pedestrians walking towards the foreground.

Danish photographer who’s career spanned over 70 years and he achieved widespread international recognition in the 1940s and 1950s for his abstract colour photographs.

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Keld-Helmer Peterson

Keld-Helmer Peterson is a photographer who tends to focus on taking photos of urban/industrial landscapes and makes them into black and white silhouettes through editing. He pays close attention to lighting when photographing as it can enhance the details in his image, making interesting and dynamic patterns when he turns his images into silhouettes.

My Edits

In order to create these edits, I lowered the saturation of my images and increased the contrast which allowed me to have even white, black and grey tones throughout my photos and prepare for the next stage of editing. Then, I used the threshold tool on photoshop in order to get rid of the grey tones and make my photo purely black and white and I adjusted as I needed to get my final edits.

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.

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From 1950 to 1951, Helmer-Petersen studied at the Institute of Design art school in Chicago. The stay there had a major impact on the development of his development as an artist. Helmer-Petersen’s stay at the legendary Institute of Design came about because of his first photobook ‘122 Colour Photographs’ published in 1948. It gained international attention and was recognised as one of the pioneering examples of art photography in colour. The featured photographs explored colour as shapes and surfaces in an original way, and it is what Helmer-Petersen is best known for today. 

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.

After his time at the Institute of Design, teaching art was of great importance to Helmer-Petersen and in 1964 he was appointed the first lecturer of photography at the Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen. Until retiring in 1990, he had influenced many architectural students’ perception of architecture and photography.

From the start, architecture played a significant role in Helmer-Petersen’s work, and throughout his longstanding career he was able to combine his personal interest with his work as a professional photographer. In 1956 Helmer-Petersen established himself as a professional architecture photographer with his own studio in Copenhagen. For many years he worked with some of the most renowned Danish modern architects and designers, such as Jørn Utzon, Kay Kørbing, Poul Kjærholm, Finn Juhl, Mogens Koch and Nanna Ditzel. He did works for ferries and schools in the 1950s and 1960s and his last commission was a series of works in 2008 called ‘Structures’ which can be seen at the Copenhagen Airport train station.

My Editing in the style of Keld Helmer-Petersen

For my editing in the style of Keld Helmer Petersen, I used my industrial images taken at La Collette. I used my black and white images. I then opened them in photoshop, then used the threshold tool, and moved the intensity up/down to achieve my desired results. I then used the invert tool on some of my images to create a clearer look. These experiments worked better with clear and sharp lines, and bold bits of symettry and machinery. This is why I think my images of the machines and structures at La Collette worked best.

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New Topographics was a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers (such as Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz) whose pictures had a similar banal aesthetic, in that they were formal, mostly black and white prints of the urban landscape.

Parking lots, suburban housing and warehouses were all depicted with a beautiful stark austerity, almost in the way early photographers documented the natural landscape. An exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York featuring these photographers also revealed the growing unease about how the natural landscape was being eroded by industrial development. The show consisted of 168 rigorously formal, black-and-white prints of streets, warehouses, city centres, industrial sites and suburban houses. Taken collectively, they seemed to posit an aesthetic of the banal.

America experienced a robust growth till the early 1970s, with this, the historical background of urban America was founded, a full swing urban growth which coincided with the period of baby boom (1946-mid 60s). Seventy-six million children were born, creating an enormous demand for housing, meaning once natural landscapes were built upon, becoming heavily urbanised and industrialised. The word urban (derived from from Latin word “urbane”) relates to or constituting a city. It also means polished and smooth, obviously a stark contrast to the natural soft shapes of natural landscape which were being photographed in the subject of romanticism.

IMPORTANT URBAN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHERS

JOEL STERNFELD

Joel Sternfeld is a seminal contemporary American artist known for his large-format colour photographs of American towns and cities. Influenced by the roadside photography of Walker Evans, Sternfeld’s projects document people and places with an exacting sense of colour that visually rhymes with the subject matter, as seen in his seminal series American Prospects (1987). “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium,” he reflected. “It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say.” Born on June 30, 1944 in New York, NY, he received his BA in visual art from Dartmouth College in 1965.

Sternfeld’s projects have consistently explored the possibility of a collective American identity by documenting ordinary people and places throughout the country. Each project he embarks on is bound by a concept that imbues it with subtle irony, often through insightful visual juxtapositions or by pairing images with informational text. Another characteristic aspect of Sternfeld’s work is that colour is never arbitrary; it functions in highly sophisticated ways to connect elements and resonate emotion.

HENRY WESSEL JR

Originally from New Jersey, Henry Wessel, Jr. fell in love with the California light on a visit in 1970. Immediately afterwards, he moved to San Francisco, immersing himself in the sights and spaces of California. Wessel created his “House Pictures” series in Southern California from the armrest of his truck in the early 1990s.

The images appear as a survey of playfully candy-coloured bungalows that suggest a human presence only in details, such as a modest cooler left curb side or a garden hose coiled against the side of a house. Although different in colour, the structural similarities of the bungalows—as well as the similar compositions of the photographs themselves—imply both the futility of originality and the manufactured quality of the American dream of home ownership. Wessel continued this banal, casual aesthetic with all his images- capturing Californian suburbia life through material belongings.

ROBERT ADAMS

Robert Adams is an American photographer best known for his images of the American West. Offering solemn meditations on the landscapes of California, Colorado, and Oregon, Adams’s black-and-white photos document the changes wrought by humans upon nature. “By Interstate 70: a dog skeleton, a vacuum cleaner, TV dinners, a doll, a pie, rolls of carpet. Later, next to the South Platte River: algae, broken concrete, jet contrails, the smell of crude oil,” he wrote. “What I hope to document, though not at the expense of surface detail, is the form that underlies this apparent chaos.”

Born on May 8, 1937 in Orange, NJ, his family moved around the Midwest throughout his childhood, finally settling in Wheat Ridge, CO in 1952. Adams went on to study English at the University of Redlands and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California in 1965. It wasn’t until the near completion of his dissertation for USC that Adams began to take photography seriously, learning techniques from professional photographer Myron Wood and reading Aperture magazine. In the 1970s, he was released the book The New West (1974), and a year later was included in the seminal exhibition “New Topographics”: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.

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