Stephen Shore (American, b.1947) is an American photographer well-known for producing deadpan images of banal scenes. He is a pioneer of colored art photography. Shore was born in New York, NY, and is largely a self-taught artist. He became interested in photography at the age of six when he received a darkroom kit of photography as a gift from his uncle. At the age of nine, Shore was given another photography gift; this time the gift was a 35 mm camera, which he used to start taking photographs right away. Soon after that, he received Walker Evans‘ American Photographs and was convinced of his photographic abilities so much so that he presented several of his works to Edward Steichen (American, 1879–1973) of the Museum of Modern Art at the age of 14. His interest in photography continued to grow, and when he met Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987) at the Factory three years later, he became a regular at the studio, and photographed works and visitors there. At age 24, the photographer held a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Soon after the solo exhibition, Shore embarked on a series of road trips and took several photographs of the American and Canadian landscapes he crisscrossed. The trip from Manhattan to Amarillo in 1972 proved to be eventful and awakened Shore’s interest in color photography. He took a series of photographs of the streets using different types of cameras. Shore received a NEA endowment fund in 1974 and a Guggenheim grant in 1975 that helped him further his work. In 1982, he published Uncommon Places: 50 Unpublished Photographs, a major work in color photography that, together with the works of William Eggleston (American, b. 1939), helped to cement the place of color photography in art. He is believed to have borrowed from the Photorealism works of other artists. Shore also published other books like Essex County and The Velvet Years.

Helmer-Petersen was born and grew up in the Østerbro quarter of Copenhagen. He started taking photographs in 1938, when he received a Leica camera as a graduation present. At an early stage, he became aware of the trends in international photography; in the 1940s he subscribed to the US Camera Annual and in this period became familiar with German inter-war photography, which had developed at the Bauhaus and in the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement.

The pioneering effort with 122 Colour Photographs brought Helmer-Petersen a grant from the Denmark–America Foundation to study at the Institute of Design in Chicago (founded by László Moholy-Nagy in 1937 under the name New Bauhaus). During his stay at the school, he both taught and studied under (among others) the American photographer Harry Callahan. Helmer-Petersen began to experiment with the contrast in graphic black and white expression influenced by constructivist artists and their fascination with industry’s machines and architecture’s constructions. A selection of the photographs that Helmer-Petersen created in Chicago was published in the little book Fragments of a City (1960). This offers a portrait of the city in thirty-five tightly composed graphic images and is a radical example of Helmer-Petersen’s graphic and formal experimentation.

Helmer-Petersen’s approach to photography was by and large experimental and explorative. Again and again, he worked on the borders of what we normally consider to be photography. Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper). His curiosity about pushing the limits of the media was expressed in several experimental short films, including Copenhagen Boogie from 1949.

From the 1970s, Helmer-Petersen was preoccupied with the figurative potential in found objects. Like Irving Penn (and at the same time), Helmer-Petersen walked sidewalks, head down, making discoveries among the windswept and downtrodden street refuse. This resulted in works such as the series Deformationer. From 1974 to 1993, he created a large series of close-up abstract colour photographs of walls, timber stacks, etc. A selection of these was published in the book Danish Beauty, in 2004.

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for these images i changed the threshold creating the black and white look a lot like Keld Helmer Petersen’s work but for the second one I inverted it to have a slightly different one

Keld Helmer-Petersen

who was he ?

Keld Helmer-Petersen is one of the most influential Danish photographers in the 20thCentury. 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. His efforts have put a mark on photography as an artistic expression.

Contact Sheets

Below are some of my contact sheets – I imported my images into Lightroom, into a new collection called Urban Landscapes. I then used the P and X tools to select and deselect my images and find my favourites.

Here I have used P and X to delete images from my selection that are out of focus, overexposed or hazy.

Here I have de-selected images with not the best composition, a wonky horizon line, or an uninteresting subject.

In this contact sheet, I had some trouble with overexposure – I deselected these images and cropped some of my favourites that still had this issue to improve the quality of the image.

Havre Des Pas Buildings and housing images

These images are mostly in the style of my artist John Myers. I am planning to edit these in high contrast black and white to emulate his work. These were taken around Havre Des Pas pool, along the Boardwalk, and towards La Collette.

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Machinery and abstract images

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Typology Images

These images are going to be used as part of my images in the style of Berndt and Hilla Becher, who created Typologies that were a key part of The New Topographics.

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Evaluation

Overall, I think this shoot was really successful compared to some of my others. The bright and sunny weather really helped to prevent over/under-exposed images, as well as using the correct settings (landscape) and lens for the genre and idea I was focussing on. I had a bit of trouble with not enough/ too much zoom in my images, which created a few unbalanced compositions, however, I managed to fix this with the help of cropping.

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The New Topographics

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“New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” was an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography.

The term Topographics was coined by William Jenkins. The New Topographics creating a turning point of moving away from the traditional depictions of landscape photography. New Topographics placed an emphasis on the industrial and increasingly suburbanised world. 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. New Topographics gained a varied response from the public:

“I don’t like them—they’re dull and flat. There’s no people, no involvement, nothing.”

“At first it’s stark nothing, but then you look at it, and it’s just about the way things are.”

“I don’t like to think there are ugly streets in America, but when it’s shown to you—without beautification—maybe it tells you how much more we need here.”

New Topographics focused on capturing the changing world and changing landscapes, in contrast to landscape artists such as Ansel Adams who based there studies on preserving the natural landscape and used they’re images in hope of protecting these sights from industrial change.

New Topographics, although rarely containing people within the images, represented the human impact on the landscapes, through the use of man made buildings, perhaps leading people to care and concern more for the natural environment and landscapes. However, new Topographics can also be seen as beautiful. Their stark, beautifully printed images of this mundane but oddly fascinating topography was both a reflection of the increasingly suburbanised world around them, and a reaction to the tyranny of idealised landscape photography that elevated the natural and the elemental.

The New Topographics

‘New Topographics’ was a term used by William Jenkins in 1970 to refer to a group of photographers whose urban landscape photos all had similar formal and black and white aesthetics. They were known for having an ‘anti-aesthetic’ as they took formal photos of America’s landscape as it was without romanticising it. This was as they wanted to shift away from traditional landscape photography and draw attention towards how natural landscapes were being overtaken by manmade structures.

Some of their work includes:

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.

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.

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From the 1970s, Helmer-Petersen was preoccupied with the figurative potential in found objects. Like Irving Penn (and at the same time), Helmer-Petersen walked sidewalks, head down, making discoveries among the windswept and downtrodden street refuse. This resulted in works such as the series Deformationer.

Helmer-Petersen’s approach to photography was by and large experimental and explorative. Again and again, he worked on the borders of what we normally consider to be photography. Among other things, throughout his career he worked with “cameraless” photography, the photogram (a darkroom technique in which objects are placed directly on light-sensitive photographic paper). His curiosity about pushing the limits of the media was expressed in several experimental short films, including Copenhagen Boogie from 1949.

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My Examples

Below I have included my images edited in the same style of Keld Helmer-Peterson’s, I think that this way of editing works well with images that have many bold lines and larger shapes, I found that some of my images didn’t have these features so editing in this way was challenging but overall a success.

Process: After selecting images to open up on Photoshop, I changed the images to black and white at first, then clicked on the Threshold setting where a gage appeared that allowed this setting to e changed up and down, to get the perfect final product there needed to be a good balance between having a plain background and detail in objects and textures in the foreground.

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About

 He began to photograph birds and landscapes with a Kodak box camera as a child. In 1933 he was powerfully moved by the photographs of Ansel Adams, who encouraged him to work with a large-format camera.

Throughout his career, he also travelled and photographed locations of cultural significance. The locations that he photographed were Utah, California, Maine, Antarctica, Iceland, East Africa, Mexico, Egypt, China, Greece, and Czechoslovakia. 

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 His work

He developed a vision of the landscape that looked closer, caught the natural chaos of the wild but in a way that showed the hidden structures. He is the forefather of colour landscape photography.

He would frequently intensify blues, greens and reds while enriching the texture of trees, rocks and flowing streams to give his images a painterly aesthetic.

Keld Helmer

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

Keld Helmer-Petersen is recognised as a pioneer of colour photography. His self-published book 122 Colour Photographs, appeared in 1948. The photographs were ground-breaking in their use of colour as subject and their abstract qualities. As Martin Parr observes ‘…for the 1940s it was sensational – way ahead of its time.’

I don’t want my pictures to ‘look like something’. They should just look like pictures.

    Keld Helmer-Petersen, Life, November 28, 1949

​But significantly, over a career that spanned six decades, the vast majority of Helmer-Petersen’s work involved black and white photography – often portraying a very graphic sensibility achieved by exposing high-contrast film negatives.

editing process

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final images

As well as experimenting with high contrast black and white images, I also experimented with colour gradients and invert to really bring out the shape of the industrial buildings.

I imported my images into light room and used a flagging system using p and x inspired by romanticism and rural landscape photography inspired by Fay Godwin’s work

Final images

comparison with Godwin’s work

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Although my image isn’t in black and white I think I was able to capture a pretty similar image with the cliff face being the main focal point I was also able to capture the textures in the image similarly to Fay over all I think I managed to capture a similar romanticised aspect of a softness in the image.