What were the goals of New Objectivity in photography?The New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) emerged as a style in Germany in the 1920s as a challenge to Expressionism. As its name suggests, it offered a return to unsentimental reality and a focus on the objective world, as opposed to the more abstract, romantic, or idealistic tendencies of Expressionism.
The new objectivity is a very minimalistic choice of photography which includes a lot of lines and repetition of shapes. It is mainly in black an white which adds depth.
The term still life comes from the Dutch word stilleven
Coined in the 17th century when paintings of objects enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe. The stimulus for this term came as artists created compositions of greater complexity, bringing together a wider variety of objects to communicate allegorical meanings.
Still life featured mainly in the experiments of photography inventors Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot, as far back as the 1830s. They did this in part, for practical reasons: the exceptionally long exposure times of their processes precluded the use of living models.
Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Paulette Tavormina
A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death.
‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’
This is where the term vanitas comes from, the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
History of still life photography
In the 17th century, still life became a genre in art, most of these paintings were about religion or death.
When cameras were invented, a photographer called Adolf de Meyer, used the genre of still life for his first ever photo.
Alleged first still life photo taken by Adolf de Meyer.
Over the years, as colour photographs emerged, photographers starting using still life more and more. As it became a more popular genre, the still life images taken got even better than they were before.
Some examples of still life photography now.
Vanitas
As stated earlier, the word vanitas comes from the opening lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible.
Vanitas relates to what was mentioned earlier, death and is mainly used in art, it shows how painful or beautiful life is, in its entirety.
A vanitas image:
Here you can see a skull, which is in the centre of the image, showing that it could be a key part of the image and lots of other objects like a crown and a sceptre which can symbolise the power of death however the flowers in the back could symbolise the beauty of life and the beginning of life. This image, and other vanitas images, contains both elements of life and death and can be interpreted in many different ways.
In our studio, we currently have two systems. The Continuous Lighting system and the Flash Lighting system.
Continuous Lighting:
The Continuous Lighting system is the system with the always-on lights. Also paired with the curved platform to prevent reflections.
It is a perfect system to use for when you want to take basic photos. You can even place films over the light to change the colour.
Flash Lighting:
The flash lighting system works slightly differently, the lights are programmed to flash just as you take a picture. And the photo will come out like as if you took it in normal lighting. You have a fainter light on the side to see what you’re doing when in the dark and to move things to as you see fit.
We went into the studio to take photos of a musket ball, a gunpowder horn, a photo book and tap shoes. These weren’t my objects so unfortunately I cannot input a description of why they mean so much to me.
But I can describe what they mean to Nic Rolland, the owner of these items. He likes to have these as they describe his way of life in stage performing, including tap dancing. He is interested in history involving war. So he can connect with the gunpowder horn and the musket bullet. His grandfather was in the Royal Navy and the book contains photos of him during his service.
Formalism in photography is when the photographer becomes the visual designer. It tells us how important form is in photography and art as it only features visual aspects and less about narrative content. Formalism can be analysed and organised into nine categories.
The Nine Categories of Formalism:
Light: Light is wherever the photo is brightest. Whether it be the actual object or in the environment around it. When annotating Light you should decide whether it is natural or artificial. With Light you can even figure out the time of day the photo was shot.
Line: This is when you look for anything in the photo that create lines. It doesn’t matter if they are straight or curvy. You should analyse what kind of shape it creates or the angle/point of view the photo was taken from.
Repetition: Is when you look for any rhythm or pattern with the objects anywhere in the photo.
Shape: Quite self-explanatory, look for any shapes in the photograph and label them. Point out the names of them too if you can. An interesting thing to do is to point out if the edges seem natural (wavy) or geometric (straight).
Space: Look for any depth in the photo, is it deep? Is it shallow? Take Depth of Field into account by including the distance each object may have.
Texture: How much is seen in the photo? Is it crowded or is it empty? Make sure you compare the smoothness and/or grittiness of the image.
Value/tone: Look for any tones or colours in the photo and how many. How well do they contrast? What is the main tone of the photo? How does it make you feel?
Colour: How many colours are there? Make use of explaining the saturation, contrast, vibrancy etc. Also make sure you point out the main colour and the complimentary colours.
Composition: This is how the Photographer arranges the visual elements, it makes use of how we look at each item in the photo, for how long and in what order. For example, if you take a picture of something in the foreground and in the background, we are more likely to look at the foreground object first because it is closer and most likely clearer.
Exploring Formalism:
In class we looked at a few photos and labelled them to spot any elements involving formalism. Above you can see that the photo has been labelled quite a lot.
The table’s colour can fall into the Light section of formalism, as due to it’s colour it is the most eye-grabbing part of the image.
Lines can be seen going across the strip of the red wood on the wall behind.
The tiles on the floor contain some Repetition as it creates a pattern.
It is clearly taken from close range, so the Space is not so great.
There are a handful of Colours seen in this photo, such as green white and red. These colours make me think of Christmas.
These are just examples, there is much more to be highlighted in that photo. But this is just to demonstrate how to spot these details and label them.
Technical
Natural light used in the street.
Contextual
Making Do and Getting By investigates the process of perception and communication – how we see what we see, what we do with what we see, how we name what we think we have seen, who we share it with and who is speaking to whom.
Conceptual
The meaning of this work is to highlight the perception and communication and how we see things, process things and share things.
I made these still life edits using Lightroom classic by enhancing the temp of the images and illuminating the oldness of some of the objects. Overall I enjoyed this process of taking the images and experimenting on lightroom
This image is one of my favourites because I like the contrast between the blue overlay and the light shining through the objects. I think the blue is fitting as it represents the sea and all the objects were collected from the beach bringing the image together as a whole.
This image is another personal favourite as the vignette, as well as the damaged objects, adds a vintage feel to the image.
Formalist Photography: The design, composition and lighting are dominant over subject matter. The photographer becomes a visual designer whenever a frame is captured. In camera cropping concentrates on the desired subject while eliminating everything else. Formalism describes the critical position that the most important aspect of a work of art is its form – the way it is made and its purely visual aspects – rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world.
Photo Analysis
Peter Fraser- Contemporary Still Life Photography.- the image I analysed.
The Artist
Peter Fraser is a British fine art photographer. He was shortlisted for the Citigroup Photography Prize in 2004. He was born in 1953 (age 69 years) in Cardiff, United Kingdom. Peter Fraser attended schools in Cardiff, Glamorgan and the Rhondda Valley. He acquired his first camera at the age of 7, and after a false start studying Civil Engineering, at 18, began studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic the following year. In the summer of 1974 he lived in New York and worked at the Laurel Photography Bookstore at 32nd St and 6th Avenue which significantly expanded his sense of photography’s expressive possibilities. He graduated in 1976.
The Photo
analysation of the photo we did in class
Visual: The colours in this image are quite bright and bold. The white areas in the middle of the photo become the area of focus as they are the most highlighted area of the photo. The tone mostly concluded of dark colours with highlights, and the illuminated centre contrasts with the dark rim around it and the bold redness of the wire. The wire has many different textures, mostly being made up of the gritty texture in the centre, which further adds to it being the area of focus. The wire is made out of many circles, the outside of the wire being a 3D cylinder. There is a repetition of circles seen throughout the photo, starting with the circles in the middle of the wire and spreading through the entire photo. The curved ridges on the exterior of the wire create a pattern, creating a pattern that causes our eyes to follow it until we reach the edge of the edge of the picture.
Technical: This picture appears to have been taken so that there was a shallow DoF- meaning the aperture must’ve been quite widely open and set in the lower f-numbers. The shallow DoF causes the background behind the wire to be blurry, making the wire stand out and be a clear area of focus.
