Gustave Le Gray:

Gustave Le Gray was born in Paris in 1820. He took up photography around 1847 and his inventions and photographs became very influential.

The Great Wave, the most dramatic of his seascapes, combines Le Gray’s technical mastery with expressive grandeur. He took the seascape on the Mediterranean coast. You can see that the clouds are cut off where they meet the sea. This indicates that two separate negatives have been joined. The combination of two negatives allowed Le Gray to achieve tonal balance between sea and sky on the final print. It gives a more truthful sense of how the eye perceives nature, rather than the camera.

Dafna Talmor:

Dafna Talmor is a London based photographer who creates collages of different landscapes to to make a staged landscape by, slicing and cutting out the negatives. Dafana Talmor’s constructed landscapes shows the creative process photographers go through to get a final image.

For the ‘Gold Circle’ image it shows many techniques used such as slicing to construct the man made features in the final outcome.

Comparision:

Both of these images could be described as landscape images. ‘The great wave’ describes the landscape as dramatic landscape with the rough sea and the dark, heavy clouds. However the ‘Gold Circle’ describes the landscape as mysterious and creative, leaving the audience wondering what landscapes make up the final image. Both of the images have been manipulated to remove the negatives and are of seascapes. The differences in the images are that ‘The great wave’ is a more stereotypical landscape image made up of the same landscape whereas the ‘Gold Circle’ is more abstract and is a combination of landscapes .