My plan with this project is to focus on the simplicity and complexity of the landscapes and architecture of the place I live, Jersey. I have studied 2 artists/photographers, Hiroshi Sugomito and Andreas Gursky, who I believe fit into my ideas perfectly as they both demonstrate the simplicity and complexity of architecture and landscapes within their work. I would like to document the architecture and landscape of Jersey because, I believe it is important to appreciate the land around yourself, especially when it is the place you have grown up. My plan is to shoot 5-7 photo-shoots of different landscapes and architecture in and around Jersey in order to ensure I am fully prepared for my exam. I also want to experiment with taking shots at different times of the day and during different weather conditions. I also want to explore the use of photo manipulation to create various different outcomes of work. I want to use techniques such as, photo montaging, juxtapositioning, multiple exposure shoots as well as using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to create some interesting and effective outcomes. I plan to start my study straight away in order to give myself enough time to capture a lot of the island.
Andreas Gursky is a German photographer known for his large-scale, highly-detailed photographs of architecture, landscapes, and everyday objects. Born in Leipzig, Germany in 1955, Gursky studied photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany and later at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the tutelage of the influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Gursky has exhibited his work internationally and has been the subject of major retrospectives at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Hasselblad Award in 1998 and the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography in 2007.
His Work
Gursky’s photographs often feature vast, complex spaces such as supermarkets, factories, and stock exchanges, which he photographs from a distance and with a bird’s eye view perspective. His photographs are meticulously composed, often taking weeks or even months to prepare and shoot. He uses digital manipulation techniques to create highly-detailed and often surreal images, pushing the boundaries of what is traditionally considered photography. His photographs challenge the viewer’s perception of space, time, and reality, often featuring a bird’s eye view perspective that emphasizes the scale and magnitude of the spaces he photographs.
Andreas Gursky’s work has a profound impact on viewers due to its ability to challenge and transform the way we see and experience the world around us. His large-scale, highly-detailed photographs of vast and complex spaces have a disorienting effect, often leaving viewers feeling overwhelmed by the scale and magnitude of the environments depicted. By depicting spaces and objects in such a hyper-realistic manner, Gursky’s work encourages viewers to question their assumptions about the world and our place within it. His photographs challenge us to consider the relationship between humans and the built environment, as well as the impact of technology on our perceptions of space and time.
Image Analysis
Rhein II
At first glance, this image appears to be a simple and serene image of a river flowing through a flat, rocky landscape. However, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the image has been heavily manipulated and stripped of all human elements, creating a surreal and otherworldly scene. Gursky’s use of digital manipulation techniques is particularly evident in the image’s strikingly uniform color and tone, which give the river and surrounding landscape a flat, almost monochromatic quality. The image is also highly detailed, with individual rocks and ripples on the river’s surface rendered with exquisite precision. The absence of any human presence in the image creates a sense of timelessness and emptiness, as if the landscape has been frozen in time. The river and surrounding rocks seem to stretch on forever, creating a sense of vastness and infinity that is both awe-inspiring and unsettling.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect known for his black-and-white photographs of seascapes, movie theaters, and museum dioramas. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1948 and studied at Saint Paul’s University, Tokyo, before moving to Los Angeles to attend the Art Center College of Design.
Sugimoto’s photographs often explore themes of time, perception, and memory. His seascapes, which he has been photographing since the 1980s, are often taken at dawn or dusk and appear as minimalist, abstract compositions that capture the vastness of the ocean and sky. His photographs of movie theaters capture the experience of cinema by capturing the empty seats and screen. In his museum diorama series, he photographs taxidermy animals and other staged scenes in natural history museums, highlighting the artifice of representation and our human impulse to document and preserve.
His Work
Sugimoto’s work is known for its technical precision and formal beauty. He often uses large-format cameras and long exposures to create images that are sharp and detailed, with a wide tonal range. His work has been exhibited in major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. He is considered one of the most important photographers of our time and has won numerous awards, including the Hasselblad Award in 2001 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2009.
His photographs are often described as meditative and serene, inviting the viewer to slow down and contemplate the beauty and mystery of the world around us. Sugimoto’s seascapes, for example, have a hypnotic quality that can induce a sense of calm and introspection in the viewer. At the same time, Sugimoto’s work often challenges our assumptions about the nature of reality and representation. His museum diorama series, for example, calls attention to the ways in which we construct and interpret knowledge about the natural world, and raises questions about the relationship between truth, illusion, and imagination.
In his “Architecture” series, Sugimoto has photographed some of the most famous buildings in the world, including the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Pantheon. These photographs often feature the structures in silhouette against a dramatic sky or with the surrounding environment erased through the use of long exposures. By abstracting the buildings in this way, Sugimoto emphasizes their geometry and form, allowing the viewer to appreciate their aesthetic beauty on a purely visual level. Sugimoto’s work in architecture often explores the themes of time and memory, highlighting the ways in which these concepts are embedded in the built environment. Through his photographs and installations, he invites the viewer to consider the history and significance of the structures that surround us, and to appreciate the ways in which architecture shapes our understanding of the world around us.
Image Analysis
Church of the Light, 1997
The photograph is black and white and features a stark, minimalistic composition that is characteristic of Sugimoto’s work. The central element of the photograph is a simple cross-shaped opening in the wall of the church, which frames a bright beam of light that enters the space. The beam of light is positioned in the center of the cross, and creates a stark contrast with the dark, shadowy interior of the church. The walls and ceiling of the space are plain, with no ornamental or decorative features, emphasizing the starkness of the space. The photograph is notable for its precise use of geometry and proportion, as well as its play on light and shadow. The cross-shaped opening creates a sense of symmetry and balance, and the beam of light acts as a metaphorical representation of divine light or spiritual illumination. The contrast between the bright light and dark shadows creates a sense of drama and tension, and emphasizes the sense of mystery and awe that is often associated with religious spaces.
Nan Goldin (born September 12, 1953) is a New York-based photographer known for her works exploring subcultures within her community. Goldin was first introduced to photography at the age of fifteen by a teacher who passed out Polaroid cameras to students at the progressive Satya Community School in Boston. Her projects showcase images depicting topics such as sexuality, intimacy, drug abuse and the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s, heavily influenced by her childhood and upbringing where at age 11 Goldin’s sister died by suicide, one of the first events in her life that would later lead her to photography. After being introduced to photography by a teacher, Goldin held her first solo show in 1973, composed of a collection of images she had taken of Boston’s gay and drag community whilst embarking on a photographic journey throughout the city. The immediate connection she felt to capturing a community led her to begin her first and arguably most recognized work, The Ballad Of Sexual Dependency in 1974.
Images from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
When Goldin was 18 in 1974, she began to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There she would begin taking photographs and documenting her life for what would turn out to be The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which is arguably her most recognized work. It is a documentary-style photobook composed of over 700 images that serves as a personal narrative to Goldin, formed out of the artists’ experience around New York, Boston, Berlin and elsewhere. The book is dedicated to Goldin’s friends, many of which passed away after suffering from complications as a result of AIDS. The book liberates the self-expression of Goldin and her friends, captured in intimate moments of highs and lows. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” Goldin wrote. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail. It enables me to remember.” Her project was revealed in a diaristic narrative sequence of often unfocused but strongly coloured transparencies arranged as a slide show. Accompanied by a musical score featuring rock, blues, reggae and so on. The presentation was initially shown in nightclubs and eventually in galleries. Goldin continued to work on this project throughout the 1980s, and it was reproduced in 1986 in photobook form.
“Picnic on the esplanade, Boston 1973.”
Continuing to photograph drag queens in the 1990s, she produced and later published two books composed of images she’d taken of her drag queen friends over the years – The Other Side, 1972-1993, titled after a club she used to frequent, and The Family of Nan, 1990–92, in which she documented her friends’ AIDS-related deaths. Goldin started taking photographs of drag queens in 1972 and soon developed an obsession with them, as she has described: “I never saw them as men dressing up as women, but as something entirely different – a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two.” Her photographs became a form of homage. An example is the image above depicting Goldin and her friends laughing and enjoying a picnic. This candid shows the perspective Goldin aimed to embody in her work as she tried to defy negative stereotypes surrounding sexuality and drag. The image is one of many of her very personal declaration of love and gratitude to these drag queens, who showed her a way out of the captivity of gender standards and stereotypes in identity. As she put it: “The pictures in this book are not of people suffering gender dysphoria but rather expressing gender euphoria…. The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary; they are the real winners in the battle of the sexes because they have stepped out of the ring”.
Although Goldin’s most famous works are those of her friends, she often turned the camera on herself, producing a collection of intimate images depicting herself at different stages throughout her life, from her chaotic 70’s lifestyle to her eventual rehabilitation and recovery in the late 80’s and beyond. These self-portraits show the impact of her hedonistic lifestyle, whether through portraits capturing moments of peace and intimacy, or through images showing the darker side of hedonism, showcasing addiction, self-destruction and violence. These photographs have a very personal feel to them and embody the insider diaristic narrative that Goldin pushed to convey in her work to produce hazy, gritty images enhanced by deep shadows, a blurred lens and vibrant lighting.
After the publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Goldin found herself struggling with addiction, and checked herself into a rehabilitation centre in the late 80’s. After a few years of hiatus from photography, Goldin returned in 1994 with the release of Tokyo Love, a photobook she worked on in collaboration with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. In 1992, the editors of the Japanese Magazine Deja-Vu invited Goldin to Tokyo to meet Nobuyoshi Araki, a photographer hailed for his intimate, diaristic photographic style that was often compared to Goldins. During the creation of the book, Goldin found herself immersed in the new, unfamiliar subculture of Tokyo, and went on to document the lifestyle of adolescents in Japan, producing powerful images showing the expression of a subculture through documented the lifestyle of adolescents in Japan through colourful, culture-filled urban photographs depicting, in Araki’s words, the ‘joys of life’.
IMAGE ANALYSIS
This image is one of many taken from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency that portrays the subject through the insider narrative. The subject in this photo in Goldin herself, looking at her reflection in a bathroom mirror. The image is staged, positioning Goldin in the centre of the photograph to highlight her as the solo viewpoint and draw the viewers eye – this is done so through colour contrast between the deep blue of the bathroom tiles and illumination of Goldins face by the artificial lighting from the flash of the camera, which is reflected onto the walls tiles. Elements of natural lighting seep into the photograph and highlight blur within the image caused by low shutter speed. The photograph at first doesn’t let onto Goldins background and character, but upon further inspection could reflect her emotional state, a reoccurring theme within her self-portraits – this is enhanced by colour theory, with the bold blue colours possibly hinting at feelings of sadness and isolation, emotion Goldin has battled throughout stages of her life. The lack of eye contact towards the camera and instead to herself could represent her inner conflict with her self-destructive lifestyle she dealt with whilst living in Boston.
‘Sandy in the Mirror 3, 1983’
This image is another example of how colour theory creates contrast and emotion in a photo. The vibrant red and orange tones of the image, taken in a collection of 3, enhance the photo by creating feelings of chaos, excitement and energy. The photo itself is of Goldin’s friend Sandy, getting ready to go out – a reoccurring scene in Goldins work. The image is candid but appears staged through enhancement of lighting and shutter speed – the slightly jittery, shaky effect that is left in the photograph captures the adrenaline of party culture Goldin experienced throughout her photographic journey. In contrast from the previous mirror photo, the image provides a unique viewpoint and a combination of both insider and outsider narrative that brings the viewer in the room with Goldin through the intimate embracing colours of the lighting.
